Part of our guide to transcribing any instrument.
The ukulele is one of the easiest instruments to pick up a song on, but the tab you want is often nowhere to be found, especially for newer or lesser-known tracks. Here is the honest setup before we start: Songscription does not export a ukulele-specific tab. What it does do is pull the chords straight from a recording and export a guitar tab and standard notation, and those get you most of the way to a playable ukulele part. The chords transfer to the uke as-is, and a guitar tab of a picked part adapts to the uke's four strings once you know the simple tuning relationship between the two instruments. This guide walks through both.
For most ukulele players, most of the time, what you actually need is the chords, and that part is direct. The tab side is for when a song has a specific picked figure, an intro riff, or a chord-melody passage you want to reproduce note for note.
Start With the Chords
For most songs, the chords are the whole part. Upload the recording to Songscription and it listens to the audio and writes out the harmony as chord symbols you can edit, so you are not depending on whether an accurate chord sheet happens to exist for that track. That matters most for newer releases and lesser-known songs, where crowd-sourced charts are thin or missing. The ukulele reads the same chord symbols as any instrument, so the chart you get works as-is; you just play the ukulele shapes for those chords rather than guitar or piano shapes. We cover this side in full in how to get the ukulele chords to any song.
Use Guitar Tab as a Reference
When a song has a specific picked line, an intro riff, or a chord-melody passage, you want the actual notes, not just the chords. Songscription can export that part as a guitar tab or as standard notation. Neither is a ukulele tab, but both tell you exactly which notes are played and when, and that is what you adapt from. Standard notation is the most portable form, since it names the notes independently of any instrument, but a guitar tab is often easier to read for a fretted-instrument player and maps onto the ukulele more directly than you might expect, because the two instruments share four strings. Our guide to converting audio to guitar tabs covers getting that tab in the first place.
The Guitar-to-Ukulele Tuning Trick
Here is the relationship that makes a guitar tab useful on a ukulele. A standard soprano, concert, or tenor ukulele is tuned g-C-E-A, with a re-entrant high g string. The top four strings of a guitar, low to high, are D-G-B-E. Put a capo on those top four guitar strings at the fifth fret and they become G-C-E-A, which matches the ukulele's pitches. In other words, the ukulele is essentially the top four strings of a guitar, capoed at the fifth fret.
That gives you a practical way to read a guitar tab on the uke. When the tab uses only the top four strings, the shapes transfer directly if you think of the uke as starting five frets up: a note fretted on the guitar's top four strings lands in the same place on the ukulele with five frets subtracted. The catch is the ukulele's re-entrant high g string, which sits an octave up from where a guitar's equivalent string would be, so a bass note that runs below the melody will not always sit where a guitar tab expects. For melody and picked figures in the middle and upper range, though, the mapping is clean.
If you play a baritone ukulele, it is even simpler: the baritone is tuned D-G-B-E, exactly like the guitar's top four strings, so a guitar tab that stays on those four strings transfers with no adjustment at all. Because the transcription is editable, you can also transpose the part before exporting, which is often the easiest way to shift a line into a range that fits the uke cleanly.
Put It in a Ukulele-Friendly Key
On a standard-tuned ukulele, C and G are the friendliest keys, with most chords using open strings and needing only a finger or two, followed by F, D, and A. Songs written in flat keys like E-flat, A-flat, or B-flat are awkward, so they are good candidates for transposing into one of the friendly keys. Because a Songscription transcription is editable, moving the whole song into a better key is a single step rather than a rewrite, and it applies to both the chords and any picked part you exported. If a key change also helps your singing range, all the better. Our guide to transposing a song to any key goes deeper on how to choose.
Get the chords and tab from the recording
Upload a song and Songscription pulls the chords and a guitar tab from the audio, both editable and transposable, so you can build your ukulele part from the real notes. A free tier is available.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you make ukulele tabs from audio?
Not directly as ukulele tab, but you can get most of the way there from a recording. Songscription transcribes a song into chords and into guitar tab or standard notation. The chords transfer to the ukulele as-is, since the uke reads the same chord symbols as any instrument. For a picked part, you use the exported guitar tab as a reference and adapt it to the uke's four strings, which is straightforward once you know the tuning relationship between the two instruments.
How is a ukulele tuned compared to a guitar?
A standard soprano, concert, or tenor ukulele is tuned g-C-E-A, with a re-entrant high g string. The top four strings of a guitar are D-G-B-E. Put a capo on the guitar's top four strings at the fifth fret and they become G-C-E-A, which matches the ukulele. A baritone ukulele is tuned D-G-B-E, exactly like the guitar's top four strings, so guitar shapes on those strings transfer to a baritone uke with no change at all.
Does the ukulele use the same chords as a guitar?
It reads the same chord symbols. A G major chord is a G major chord on either instrument; only the shape your fingers make differs. So a chord chart pulled from a recording works on the ukulele as-is. You just play the ukulele shapes for those chords rather than the guitar shapes.
What key is easiest for ukulele?
C and G are the friendliest, since most of their chords use open strings and need only a finger or two, followed by F, D, and A. Songs in flat keys like E-flat or B-flat are awkward on the uke, so they are good candidates for transposing into a friendlier key, which is a single step on an editable transcription.
The fastest way to start is on a song you already want to play. Upload a recording to Songscription and pull the chords and a guitar tab from the audio, then build your ukulele part from there.
