Europa Ukulele Tab by Carlos Santana

santana amigos album coverOf all the famous instrumentals people cover on the ukulele, Europa is probably one of the most popular. Here’s an ukulele tab of Europa to help you learn the melody.

This great song by my favorite guitarist translates very well to our little four-stringed friend. As such you’ll find plenty of solo ukulele arrangements of the song that have been created over the years.

As far as I can tell, Herb Ohta Jr. pioneered Europa on the ukulele. Here’s what his version sounds like:

It’s a pretty jazzy and complex arrangement. You can find a detailed transcription by Dominator.

Europa Ukulele Tab

My ukulele tab for Europa is more traditional than the above. It follows the lead guitar part Santana tracked on his 1976 album, Amigos. It’s more straightforward and consists mostly of single note picking

The tab is transposed to the key of A minor for simplicity, but the original key is Cm. To play along with the recording you need to move everything up three frets. Or you can use a program like Anytune and digitally transpose the recording down to Am.

This is a fabulous piece to work on your dynamics with. Santana doesn’t play anything very straight. Every line he plays always has a curve to it. Sometimes he starts quiet and ends loud, sometimes loud to quiet.

Because the individual phrases of Europa are so obvious, take them one at a time and come up with multiple ways to play each one. Loudly. Softly. Loud to soft to loud. Be expressive. Listen to the recording and try to mimic the sway Carlos puts on the notes. You could seriously do this all day long and dive deeper and deeper into the line each time you played it.

There’s also an easier version of the tab that has less “tra la la” notes and would probably lend itself better to creating a solo arrangement. (There are a couple of “tra la la” notes that require a low G. If you don’t use low-G then you can just skip them.)

Europa ukulele tab PDF

Easy Europa ukulele tab PDF

In addition to the Herb Ohta, Jr. transcription linked above, Dominator has made two other tabs for Europa. All these versions can be found on his page here.

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