7 Years Ukulele Lesson by Lukas Graham

Danish band (yeah they’re a band, I had no idea) had an absolute smash hit with 7 years back in 2015. Let’s take a look at how to play it on ukulele…

7 Years Chords

Just 4 chords will see you through the bulk of this song and they’re all pretty easy to play. It’s worth noting that it’s much easier to play this song with a capo at fret 3, so if you want to play along with the original, that’s what you need to do.

The chords you will need are Em, G, C, D. For those that need it, here are the chord boxes…

7 Years Intro Riff

The piano intro converts really well to ukulele. Here’s the tab for it – nothing too taxing here…

If you’re panicking right now because your soprano only has 12 frets (and you don’t own an iUke), don’t worry. You can play this an octave lower and it will work just as well. Here’s the tab an octave lower…

Here’s me playing through that on my iUke…

A video posted by Ukulele Go (@ukulelego) on Jun 8, 2016 at 1:01pm PDT

Structure and Rhythm

For the large part you’re just going to be playing Em, G, C, D throughout, playing just half a bar of each. If you really want to get it sounding like the recorded version though you’re going to need to get a passing D chord in directly before the G.

Notice the D chord that appears as you count eighth notes (1 and 2 and…) just before the 3rd beat. It’s up to you whether you play this as a up strum here or not. Personally, I play it as a down strum when the rhythm is kept this simple (it’s just a little easier for me to illustrate the counting by showing it as an up).

The second bar goes something like this…

That should see you pretty much through the song. You’ll probably want to mix the strumming pattern up a bit as you go – just make sure that you keep to the timing shown above and you should be able to experiment with other strumming patterns to keep it sounding interesting.

If you need some inspiration when it comes to strumming take a look at my 32 strumming patterns PDF…