Category: Ukulele

Playing Karnatik music with Ukulele

Couple of months ago, I picked up an Ukulele and started learning it using Youtube videos. Started playing some easier tunes and practicing it. I am mostly interested in finger picking the lead notes than use ukulele for chords. Obviously, I still play quite bad, but I see improvement in the results and I am putting in consistent time daily to practice. Here is the playlist where I upload my ukulele recording, do check them out 🙂

I listened to few people playing karnatic music with Guitar on youtube and wanted to do the same with Ukulele. I am not a musician, so looked up some music theory and started understanding the basics on music. To start with, I started by converting Guitar notes to Ukulele to make myself familiar with notes and scale etc. This helped me a great deal. Later, I started playing Karnatic ragas with Ukulele, but they were not as polished as the ones I saw on youtube (with guitar). I have a lot to improve with my skill level. I made this fret board diagram (see image below) for Ukulele for Western and Karnatik notes and I feel it will help some people who are interested in playing Karnatic using Ukulele.

The Ukulele tuning is standard A, E, C, G and the fret board scale is C. There are limitations with Ukulele because you can only go one octave high but cannot go one octave low than the scale. I will post notes for each Karnatik (and also Hindustani) raagas and Movie songs over time. Follow this blog if you want to be updated when I post new notes sheet.