Vibrato is one of the most expressive techniques in music. Most notes you hear have a little bit of vibrato (intentional or not). Vibrato is when you vary of the pitch of a note. This is done on the ukulele by moving the string slightly. It isn’t hard to do and it sounds so good that it’s easy to get carried away with vibrato. Experiment and see how it applies to your music.
Bonus: Vibrato increases sustain!
Normal Ukulele Vibrato
Normal vibrato is made by moving your fingers up and down with the ukulele frets, vertically. This is what you see most rock/blues guitarist use. The string moves up and down on the frets like a fast group of mini-bends. It is a pronounced vibrato and can be used to emulate the human voice.
Like most ukulele techniques, vibrato can be done a few different ways. Always fine-tune things so that they work best for you (keeping in mind the general technique so you aren’t going to hurt yourself of your playing potential). That said, here’s the approach that seems to be the most common:
Hold a note and lighten your grip on the neck considerably. You want things to float. Maybe try literally letting things float – remove your thumb from the back of the neck altogether. This will make your vibrato very loose (just be sure not to drop your ukulele)! Then pick the note and rock your wrist back and forth using it as the pivot point and power for moving your finger up and down. Let the neck move around a bit if it wants to.
Classical Vibrato
Classical vibrato is created by moving your finger inside the ukulele fret horizontally – with the direction of the string. This is a more subtle vibrato and is probably harder to do than the normal kind. Brittni Paiva uses this kind of vibrato quite a bit.
Play a note and then move your whole hand back and forth parallel with the ukulele string. You are moving your hand around the fretting finger as it wiggles. The idea here is that when your hand goes towards the soundhole, you are in fact moving more of the string back over the fret, loosening the string and lowering the pitch. When your hand moves away from the soundhole, the string goes back to its original position or a bit sharp as you pull the string back over the fret, raising the pitch.
Tab:
In ukulele tab vibrato looks like this (a curvy dash around the note: ~):
A |---------
E |---~7~---
C |---------
G |---------
And in a full-staff tab it is a wavy line:
