In one of Uke Hunt’s recent Friday Links post, Al pointed out his most recent Spotify playlist. These playlists are a great place to find good ukulele music. What I wasn’t aware of was his page of all the Spotify playlists in one place, and a mixtape he created a while back. Good stuff to explore on Spotify if you’re looking for ukulele music.
Ukulele players who know what an API is can rejoice – there’s now an API for generating ukulele chord charts (and photos!). I discovered this on the Daily API Roundup over at programmableweb.com:
Ukulele Chords is a library of ukulele chord charts in various tunings. Ukulele Chords API allows developers to query and publish ukulele chords diagrams (and/or additional infos like intervals, difficulty, etc.) on their website. We’ve added this API to the Music category.
Check out the API details and docs, along with a PHP code sample, at ukulele-chords.com/api.
I subbmitted for an API key and can now produce beautiful chord charts like this one with a simple link. Here’s an example from their page:
Example: to query Csus2 chord infos, call our API: “http://ukulele-chords.com/get?ak=your_api_key&r=C&typ=sus2”
That example produces an XML result that looks like this:
Images produced for each chord variant include:
Happy chord coding!
Every year I look forward to Aldrine Guerrero and team from Ukulele Underground making the rounds of ukulele booths at NAMM, the big music industry trade show. This year doesn’t disappoint, with a 35 video playlist of ukulele manufacturers and vendors.
The Kamaka 100th Anniversary ukuleles are coming for sale online at ukes.com. And no, I’m not affiliated at all with that company – I just compulsively watch their stock. These instruments have a special 100th anniversary headstock logo. For a taste, here’s a 100th Anniversary HF-3 Tenor. Check them all out, mixed into non-100th Anniversary models, here.
Happy Easter to the Christians out there, and Happy Spring for everyone else! Here is some lovely Spring ukulele music to enjoy today.
Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons for Solo Ukulele
Spring
Here’s a song I wrote and recorded a few years ago. I’ve added to it since then and will re-record it some day, but until then…
And here’s a video and tab for this song.