Story Of My Life by Social Distortion – Ukulele Lesson/Tutorial

If you’ve arrived at this page looking for Story Of My Life by One Direction, turn back now, you’re not welcome here. If you leave quickly we’ll pretend it never happened. Have they gone? Good, right let’s get on with it.

This was one of those songs that I’d heard but never really knew who it was by until I got hold of Guitar Hero on Xbox 360 and it quickly became a favourite of mine. It’s a great song and dead easy to play on the Ukulele as it’s just 3 really simple chords. It’s a bit of a weird one to play on uke but who cares, just go for it!

The Chords

Just the 3 chords make up this song – G, C and D in that order repeating through the whole song.

story-of-my-life-chords

 

Personally I don’t barre the D chord, I play it with my 3rd finger on the 2nd string, 1st finger on the 3rd string and 2nd finger on the 4th string. You can play it any way you like but I find this the most comfortable way.

The chord sequence/structure is half a bar of G, half a bar of C and then a bar of D. That’s it, repeat to your heart’s content and give it some venom.

The Rhythm

This is another song with a pretty distinct/unique rhythm sound so again, the closer you get to this the better it’s going to sound. I’m going to give you a couple of options here, it’s a good idea to mix it up a little bit between them and even make up some of your own to keep it sounding interesting.

Super Basic Strum Pattern…

D-D-DUDU

As the first 2 chords are only half bars, you’ll just be playing 2 down strums for them before playing another then the full pattern on the D chord.

More Advanced Strum Pattern…

Moving into 16th note strumming on this one gives it a better feel, I personally play it something like this…

D-D–UDUD-D–UDU for the G and C chords (first bar)

and then…

D-D–UDU-D-D-DUDU for the D chord

If you want to push it further still then it sounds great if you hit the bass string (3rd string) instead of a full down strum the first time you change chord. You can get away with hitting the 4th string as well but it’s going to sound a bit cleaner if you can just get that 3rd string.

 

Grab my free Ukulele Go! beginners pack.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *