Riptide by Vance Joy
For this post I wanted to focus on one of the songs I’ve been learning: Riptide by Vance Joy. It’s one of my favorite camp songs and I’ve always wanted to learn how to play it. It is an iconic ukulele song, so it just made sense to give it a try.
The song uses three chords the whole way through: Am, G, and C.
- For Am, I put my pointer finger on the 2nd fret of the 4th string.
- for G, I put pointer finger on the 2nd fret of the 3rd string, my middle finger on the 2nd fret of the 1st string, and my ring finger on the 3rd fret of the 2nd string.
- For C, I put my ring finger on the 3rd fret of the 1st string.
The strumming pattern is down, down, up, down, up, and that pattern continues throughout the whole song. Once I got the rhythm down and felt comfortable switching between chords (still not perfect), the song started to sound right!
