Don't forget to join me at patreon.com/uke for exclusive sheet music, extras, early access and more!

I saw you on facebook and i need some help. How can i turn sheet music for piano to ukulele chords? I would like to play Slovenian children songs, but i only have the sheet music for piano. Can you help me?

Changing piano to ukulele chords requires a bit of knowledge of how chords are built. You’ll have to identify the chords in the piano part, by looking at the notes that are being played together and then look up those chords using something like https://ukebuddy.com/ukulele-chords

Alternatively, you can identify the key of the song, isolate the melody and then just experiment with the chords in that key to see which ones sound good to you. For example, in the key of C, the most common chords are C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, & G7. In essence, you’re ignoring the piano part and creating your own arrangement.

I sent you one photo of a Slovenian song and my way to convert piano notes into chord. First i wrote down tonality, so this song is in C. And there are three main grade: T, S, D. And on T there is C chord, on S there is F chord and on D there is G chord. So i play this song on ukulele with this three chords: c, f and g. And for every beat, i chose one of this chord. Or i just play the first note in the beat? So in the first beat there is g, so i play G chord, in the second beat there is a, so i just play A chord and so on.

This is looking quite good. There a so many ways to harmonize a simple melody like this. One of the many possibilities that I might do with my students on this melody might be (each chord = a quarter note):
C C Am Am F F Dm Dm
F F G7 G7 C G7 C
You could also use G instead of G7 if you like that better. I’ve attached a chord chart that shows how to make all the above chords.

Ukulele Bootcamp Now Completely FREE

The online version of Ukulele Bootcamp is where you will learn all about ukuleles, how to learn a song, stretches and warmups, tuning, holding the ukulele, how to read chords, strumming, tablature, the C scale, your first chords and a dozen songs. Over a decade of ukulele teaching went into creating this course and now you can enjoy it for free.


Post filed under All UkulelePlay! Blog Posts.


This site contains some affiliate links which help support the site, but cost you nothing extra if you use them. Thank you!