Today we’re going to learn how to play Twenty One Pilot’s smash House of Gold on your ukulele. It’s quite a simple song that belts along at a fair old pace so make sure your strumming arm is limbered up. Let’s get to it.
House Of Gold Chords
Seven chords will get us through this song and for the most part they’re pretty simple. The only one that may pose a few problems is the Bbm. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and I’ve got a trick we can use.
If you are struggling with the Bbm and still need a little work on barre chords, firstly you could check out my lesson on beating barre chords. But if you don’t have time for that. I’d suggest dropping off the top/G string altogether and just playing the bottom 3 strings. It’s still a barre, it’s just a little simpler.
House Of Gold Strumming Pattern
As I mentioned above this song belts along pretty quickly and the main man Tyler is using 16th note strumming for the bulk of the song. I’ve shown that pattern above.
If this looks pretty confusing to you and you’re not yet familiar with 16th note strumming then the easier way to deal with it is to think of it as 2 bars rather than one.
That would give us two bars of D DUDUDU. Essentially for each chord you’d be playing two bars of that pattern. Simple.
To give you an idea of what that sounds like when played slowly, listen to this:
And then when played a little faster (this is the chorus btw):
As always, start slowly. I’m a huge fan of using a metronome as a method of getting faster. Start really slow and gradually increase your strumming speed and you’ll get there in no time.
House Of Gold Structure and Lyrics
Take a look at the song structure in the graphic above. It’s relatively simple and the changes aren’t too bad.
As mentioned in the strumming above, generally it’s either a full bar of 16th strumming per chord change (or two bars of DDUDUDU if you’re thinking in 8th notes). The exception to this is the line will you take care of me, where the chords change halfway through a bar – you can hear this in my strumming example for the chorus further up the page.
Intro
It’s definitely worth taking a closer look at the the intro and the first instance of the chorus which is simply a C chord.
There is a lot of muting going on here though. Initially when I heard it, I thought maybe Tyler was playing a different inversion of a C chord but looking at the music video what he’s actually doing is laying his index finger across the first fret very loosely essentially muting everything but the bottom string.
When you play that, it sounds like this:
Outro
The song with a repeat of the bridge but the strumming is simplified heavily. Tyler plays a single strum for each chord change. Nice and simple.
And that should be it, with a little bit of practice you’ll be impressing your friends with your ukulele rendition of House of Gold in no time.