Baritone ukulele is a cool instrument. But it has some limitations and drawbacks from a learning standpoint that need to be understood upfront by students.
In this article I will outline some things you need to understand in order to succeed at your studies, share some awkward truths, and give you some approaches to cracking the code.
Baritone’s Place in the World
Baritone is a spinoff of standard GCEA ukulele. Cut it anyway you like, the instrument is generally approached with the same technique as a normal uke except for the lower tuning.
Because GCEA has been pioneered as the standard ukulele tuning, baritone has always played second fiddle (and likely will for many more decades).
Here’s the rub:
Ukulele has made a name for itself as an “easy” instrument. The casual group jam scene has blossomed and encouraged many previously non-musical folks to try playing music for the first time on a GCEA uke.
This popularity means there are GCEA TABs, chord sheets, and tutorials coming out our ears!
This in NOT the case for baritone.
So when someone decides to buy a baritone for fun, they often get a rude awakening when they discover there is a big lack of DGBE materials.
So where are the baritone lessons?
First of all, there are people slowly creating baritone resources. However, these are often passion projects done for fun. Because the truth is…
It’s a business risk to dedicate time to working on a baritone project.
If you’re a pro musician or educator, it’s already hard enough to make a living. Add in the wildcard factor of fickle baritone interest and it’s obvious why content creators reach for a reliable GCEA customer base nine times out of ten.
Baritone’s Bottom Line
With its lack of learning materials, baritone is automatically placed into a higher skill bracket than GCEA uke. You have to do a lot more self-study.
People ask me all the time,
“Do you have a baritone version?”
The answer is always “no” (except for Baritone Chord Shapes!) and I’m always very nice about it.
This is harsh, but it approaches the truth of the matter.
If you want to learn baritone ukulele, you have to be willing to teach yourself baritone ukulele.
That’s it. Do not expect anyone to do it for you.
Old School Perspective
Baritone ukulele today is in a very similar place as standard ukulele was 20 years ago. If you wanted to learn something, you had to do it yourself.
You’d either listen to the record or figure out how to adapt a piano transcription or guitar TAB. “Googling it” wasn’t an option because there was hardly anything to find, even if you did have internet.
Every generation of offline ukulele player made do and many went on to become the amazing musicians you know and love today.
Skills that the internet era have largely made optional are the same things that make a musician great. These are skills a baritone player needs, if not to learn the instrument, than to be a better musician.
Transposing Genius: Baritone’s Prerequisite
The good news is that it’s relatively simple to access the entire glut of GCEA learning resources for your baritone ukulele. In fact, most resources can be used at face value!
What you need to be able to do is know which sounds on your bari translate to which sounds in standard tuning.
This is basically:
- Chords names
- Note names
The fingering shapes are the same because the strings are tuned in the same intervals: 4th, major 3rd, 4th. However, the note locations on the fretboard change because the tuning pitch is different, giving everything a different name.
To get around this, all you have to do is transpose.
Transposing to DGBE is a no-brainer because with the tiniest bit of effort you can use:
- GCEA TABs
- GCEA chord diagrams
- GCEA scale diagrams
Basically, all the stuff you’d want to have access to in the first place.
Will you be a (much) better musician because of it? Also yes.
Transposing Approaches
There are three main ways you can approach transposing material. Each has its pros and cons and each will be useful in different situations.
1. Face Value
The first, and simplest, is to play from a TAB, chord chart, etc as it is visually written.
If a GCEA TAB says play the 3rd fret, 2nd string, you play the 3rd fret, 2nd string on your baritone.
This is super easy because the transposing comes in later, if and when when you need to understand what is happening.
To transpose in this style:
- Figure out what the note is supposed to be in standard GCEA tuning
- Move the pitch down a perfect 4th interval to find the actual baritone note you’re playing
If you play this GCEA TAB on baritone, as written:
It will sound like:
Notice how the standard notation notes move down a 4th. To figure out what these notes become, you can work your way through a chromatic scale:
A – A#/Bb – B – C – C#/Db – D – D#/Eb – E – F – F#/Gb – G – G#/Ab
Each note in the chromatic scale is a half step from its neighbors. A perfect 4th interval is five half steps.
So the first note in the TAB, C, counts down five notes to G:
A < A#/Bb < B < C – C#/Db – D – D#/Eb – E – F – F#/Gb - G < G#/Ab <
The next note, F#, counts down five notes:
A – A#/Bb – B – C – C#/Db < D < D#/Eb < E < F < F#/Gb – G – G#/Ab
Repeat until you know what all the notes are.
This is super tedious at first, but there are only 12 notes in Western music so eventually you will start to get familiar with each one's 4th down counterpart and memorize them.
2a. Capo
Also simple, but frustrating because it loses all of the baritone's low range is to slap a capo on the 5th fret. (More about capo transposing here.)
If you look at a baritone fretboard chart, you can see that GCEA lives on the 5th fret. By capoing here, you're essentially converting your baritone to standard GCEA tuning.
This means you can play what you see at face value from the new capoed "nut" and it will sound the same as it would on a GCEA tuned uke.
While good for getting comfortable with the higher reaches of the fretboard, you lose a lot of the low range that makes the baritone sound distinct.
Another drawback is, depending on how your brain is wired, you might struggle to see the parallels once the capo is removed. It would be a shame to spend time learning the higher part of this fretboard only for it to go out of your head because the visual is different without the capo.
For example, if the original TAB is the same as the first example:
...and you played it with a capo on the 5th fret of your baritone ukulele, the actual, physical frets you'd play are:
The capo would make it seem as if the 5th fret acts like an open string, but you're physically playing in a higher range of the fretboard.
2b. Virtual Capo
The entire concept of using a capo can be applied without actually using a capo. Just use your fingers instead.
Add five frets to any number you see on a GCEA TAB and you'll be playing the correct pitch on your bari. You might have to work harder to cover the strings and some things might be really tricky to play, but the big advantage here is that you retain the ability of playing down past the 5th fret if you'd like.
If you're a proponent of the capo approach, I recommend graduating to the virtual capo whenever possible so you're actually getting a feel for the whole instrument.
3. Full Transposing and Refretting
The hardest, but most musically useful approach is to locate the original note in its respective place on the baritone fretboard.
This means you will convert the GCEA fingering to a new fingering that leverages the DGBE tuning. Reworking the fingering means you have to consider the overall location of the notes in a passage so you place them in accessible and useful places.
The only downside to this approach is that it takes a long time at first and can be frustrating. But once you've put in the time to crack the code, you'll be able to easily figure out how to play most things on the fly and be a much better musician.
To transpose in this style:
- Figure out what the original note is
- Locate the note on the baritone fretboard
- Once you have several notes, shuffle them to fretboard locations that enable easy reach to the other notes in the phrase
Here's our original example using the same notes:
Notice how the fingering changes to utilize the entire baritone scale if we adapt it this way:
Arranging fingerings onto the fretboard takes lots of experimentation. It's like a puzzle. Just keep adjusting and iterating until it all fits as nicely as possible.
The crazy thing is that you might never find a good solution to some puzzles! You just have to suck it up and play it the hard way.
The even more crazy thing is that someone else might solve your "impossible" fingering problem in 10 seconds with their fresh perspective. Music is magical!
Conclusion
Baritone is a harder version of the ukulele. Its learning style is more old fashioned and self-guided.
That's ok. In fact, it's wonderful! ...If you can change your mindset to appreciate the longer journey it will take you on.
Don't plan to whiz through anything. Everything will take longer. You might have unanswered questions at the end of your practice sessions.
But this is a journey many have been on before and excelled at! Just because we have the internet doesn't mean it's the best way to learn music. Baritone should remind you of that. And it should remind you that the possibilities are endless.
And the possibilities are yours to own, to experience, to be a part of when you step back and say,
"Ok. I'm in. Let's learn this together, Baritone dear friend, at whatever pace is good for us."