I keep coming back to tapping on my ukulele, I think it’s because I’m always looking for ways to make it sound a little bit more full. I’ve played around with a rhythm ring and every now and again I try and do a little bit of James Hill style stuff (although obviously nowhere near as good).
There’s not that much on YouTube to help you along with getting to grips with percussion but here’s what I’ve found so far and found useful. I’ve posted the following videos in order of ease so don’t be alarmed if they’re a little basic to begin with.
Starting with a little bit of Justin Guitar (or should that be Justin Ukulele now?) playing Stand By Me. This is the first song that I ever played on a uke and actually I threw a few taps into my version too. Justin does it better though. The tapping is very basic but it fits the song well…
The next video that I found pretty useful is this one which shows you how to get a few more different drum sounds from the different areas of your ukulele…
Following on from that this video from ukulelian goes quite a few steps further and introduces some right (and left) hand tapping to add to your drum beats. This is probably the most useful video I’ve seen on ukulele percussion so far, alongside the next video from Mr Strings.
Building the drumkit from Mr Strings is another really good video, again looking at the different types of sound you can get and emulating (as much as you can) the different drums from a real drumkit. Also, that’s a pretty nice Noah Ukulele in the video.
So far that’s about all I’ve found that I think is useful, let me know if you’ve seen any others that I should add to this collection.