Aloha!

Taking a break from working on my next country song (which by the way will be Zac Brown’s Toes), I found the time to perfect my strumming pattern for this great Hawaiian song by Jack Johnson. It was the featured song for the movie Curious George in 2006 and I have always loved it.

I found a download that semi-explained the strum with X’s that I could not make sense of, plus it was in a key that was difficult to play. Not that the Key itself was hard to sing in, I never ever sang the words because I had to concentrate too much on the complicated chords.

One day I was fooling around on my uke with the chords for Drop Baby Drop and it just started to sound like Upside Down, so I looked for my notes on the strum. Naturally I became obsessed with perfecting this “double strum” pattern, which is played out over two sets of 4 beats, or as I wrote in my notes, “8 beats”. Ha. I guess the only one who could tell me if I have that right would be the man himself – wouldn’t that be cool if Jack Johnson himself commented on my blog? Ha!

Well, it proved impossible to get onto one page, and also I can’t seem to perform it without using measure bars, which will not be supported by WordPress’ formatting likely, so you will have to go to the download of my sheets, here: Upside Down A.

NOTE or SIDE BAR: I don’t want to go on the record as saying that I believe that all Hawaiian songs should be played in A. Not true at all! It just happens to be part of the chord progression that worked for me and I found I could sing along with that progression. I don’t even know what key Jack Johnson had recorded it in, but I believe it is a couple of keys lower than A.

Here’s a super-cute video: