ukulele
vol. 1, issue 3
Daniel Ho’s H awa i i a n
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Daniel Ho’s Hawaiian Odyssey
by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
The popular uke virtuoso talks about his early days, his six-string uke, and tips on practicing and choosing an instrument. Daniel Ho is one of today’s most versatile and prolific musicians on the ukulele scene, and a long time ambassador of Hawaiian music. As an artist and a producer, Ho scored a remarkable six consecutive Grammy awards in the Best Hawaiian Music Album category between 2006 and 2011, plus Grammy nominations for his solo ukulele album Polani, the piano instrumental album E Kahe Malie, and most recently On a Gentle Island Breeze, a blend of Hawaiian slack-key and ukulele tradition with Taiwanese aboriginal music (all are released on his own Daniel Ho Creations label). Ho’s music has made its mark on the big screen, too. Ho contributed ukulele and slackkey guitar to the score of 2011’s Soul Surfer, and he sang a Hawaiian-language version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” over the end credits in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Ho was raised in Honolulu, where he started playing not only ukulele but a whole band’s worth of other instruments, including organ, guitar, piano, bass, and drums. Inspired to pursue a career in music, he studied composing and arranging at the Grove School of Music in Los Angeles, and he found his first success with the smooth jazz group Kulauea- named after Hawaii’s only active volcano. Getting closer to his roots in the late ‘90’s, Ho released his first slackkey guitar album, Hymns of Hawaii, with George Kahumoke J., featuring the hooky title track that has been widely covered by uke players. In recent years Ho has been collaborating with the sing and actress Tia Carrere, a childhood friend of Honolulu, on a series of Hawaiian music albums that have added to his Grammy trove. These days, Ho travels widely with his ukulele and guitar, performing and teaching in Asia, Europe, and Australia as well as across the United
States. Looking for a way to translate music more easily between slack-key guitar and ukulele, Ho world with the KoAloha company to develop a sixstring tenor uke on which he could play the same (relative) slack-key tuning that he uses on guitar; one the resulting D-VI ukes is currently on display at the Grammy Museum. As the phone conversation from his home in Los Angeles makes clear, Ho has a passion for sharing his love for the ukulele with other players and listeners, and for bringing sophisticated new music to life on the instrument.
What sort of music did you start playing on the ukulele?
Ho: I started playing the ukulele when I was about eight years old. In grade school, a lot of people brought their ukuleles to school and played, and at the time Ohta-San [Herb Ohta] was super famous. He was on A&M records and had a song called “A Song for Anna,” which was written by Andre Popp and recorded with a sympathy in Europe, and it was a huge hit on the radio. I think he sold six million copies of his album. So “A song for Anna” is what everybody played, and that was the only song I knew for about two years. I only knew the A section- I’d walk around the house and play that. I really enjoyed it, and I moved on to classical guitar in fourth grade and become more serious about that. From there I went on to other instruments- I took classical piano in fifth grade, and them drums and bass in junior high school. I kind of dabbled with instruments. I took a lot of lessons but never mastered one instrument.
How does your formal training in music influence what you do on the ukulele?
Ho: That’s a really good question. It has everything to do with the way I approach the ukulele- specifically my classical guitar training. I use four fingers and I play in the classical style. Generally people strum the ukulele, and of course it’s the way to start, stringing and singing. I wanted to take a little different approach, so pretty much all my instruments are finger style. I try to incorporate different kinds voice leading, which I find so much fin to do because you only have four voices. To try to play a melody and counterpoint in between is something that intrigues my about arranging for the ukulele. I also don’t do very many cover tunes. Once in a while I record a song from [for example] Queen Liliuokalani on a CS. Suit I do predominately original material, and the training allows me to write and arrange song for
Your classical background really shows on your composition “Amis Rondo”
Ho: Oh year, the arpeggio kind of thing- the Spanish style. To tell you a bit about the background of the song, the Amis is a Taiwanese aboriginal tribe. I didn’t even know there were aboriginals in Taiwan until May of last year, when we were invited by a record company, Wind Music, to visit Taiwan and see if we could do a collaboration of island cultures: the hawai-
ian culture, ukulele and slack-key guitar, which is primarily vocal music, and had barbecues and james. The music fit together very nicely. So that’s how I came to write a song like that- and it’s a rondo.
What was the story behind writing “Pineapple Mango”?
Ho: That song was a homework assignment at the Grove School of Music. This school was absolutely amazing. [Dick Grove] would teach us from Monday through Thursday about a particular genre- it would be Broadway, Latin, dramatic ballads, big bad... We got the assignment on Thursday and you’d have to write the song and copy the parts for all the musicians. On Tuesday he hired an orchestra or a band. We’d have togo in and conduct it, and we had 15 minutes to get a good recording of our song. “Pineapple Mango” was the assignment for a TV main title, and it was a calypso song, with steel drums and flute and that kind of vibe. It seemed to fit very nicely on the ukulele, so I recorded it on my first ukulele CD [Pineapple Mango, now reissued as Ukulele Classics and Origins] It only has 3 chords, so amyone could play it.
What inspired the development of your six-string KoAloha ukulele, which you call the slack-key ukulele?
Ho: It’s a D-VI- D for Daniel. Around 2005 I was asked to do Ten Dys on the Island, which is a a biannual music festival in Tasmania. I really didn’t know many ukulele songs at the time because I was playing mostly slack-key
guitar, and they wanted me to go solo because of the cost of travel and all that. So I asked Paul Okami, who is KoAloha’s main Luther- He’s also the son of Alvin, who started the company- if he would consider making a six-string ukulele. Just six individual strings, no double strings, on a tenor body so I could play slack-key ukulele [using slack-key tunings]. It don’t have to be slack-key- you could just tune it like a guitar {in standard tuning} up a fourth. He gave it a try and built it, and I was really surprised that came from it. In a lot of ways it’s even more resonant that four-string because of the sympathetic vibrations of having two extra strings in the lower register. I tune it in the C Kilauea tuning. Kilauea is a tuning I developed for my slack-key guitar playing. It’s the only slack-key tuning I play, and it has a unique sound. So I tune the uke to the Kiulauea tuning up a fourth.
What are the notes?
Ho: Basically you take standard tuning and lower the three lowest-pitched strings a whole step [on guitar, the notes are DGCGBE; on the D-VI ukulele, GCFCEA]. So it’s a hybrid between G taro-path tuning, which is basically an open G chord, and standard tuning. The are a number of reasons I came up with this tuning. I tried all the slack-key tunings- there’s a whole ton of them. I need something that could function in both major and minor keys, and the taro-patch is a G major chord, so it’s not fin to play a minor chord. The other problem I found with the taro-patch tuning is the high first-string E is tuned down to D, so when you are playing scales, melodic passages, you actually have to change position even just to play a scale. I found that o be pretty awkward.
Do you play more six-string or fourstink uke these days?
Ho: I play mostly four sting if I’m doing to do a strictly ukulele performance, I use both. But I’m doing a lot of four-sting now because it connects more directly when I teach workshops. I
used to do more on the D-VI, but a lot of those times when I travel I can only bring one guitar and one uke, so I capo my guitar on the fifth fret to sing those [D-VI] songs.
How do you tune the four-sting uke then?
Ho: I use a low G [GCEA], because I do finger style and it has an extra fourth of rane [compared to re-entrant tuning] and makes the ukulele sound fuller. Unless you do the George Form banjo-like strumming stuff, pretty much anything you do with a re-entrant tuning you can do with low G as well.
You released a video on getting started with ukulele. What should people keep in mind while choosing their first instrument? Ho: The first thing I would recommend is to get guard tuners- no friction tuners. It doesn’t matter how good your uke is; you cannot tune a uke with friction tuners. The scale is too shotr and it’s just never be in tune. Even if the tone is not excellent, like if you bought a $40 or $50 uke, if it has
geared tuners, you can still get instrument in tune and it can still sound beautiful. But if you have a n ice, load, resonant instrument that is horrible out of tune all the time, it doesn’t make any sense. My favorite tone woods are ultimately rosewood back and sides with a spruce top Mahogany sounds very similar to koan, but mahogany is slightly more resonant. Koa is the word that is associated with the ukulele because it’s from Hawaii. And it can look very beautiful if you buy curly koa. One thing I think is very is very important is to use a strap when you play. When I do workshops and teach, I see a lot of people really struggle with holding the instrument. They are gripping the body with their right forearm, and the uke is sitting in their left hand, between their thumb and forefinger. There’s not a lot of playing you can do when you’re holding the instrument that way. You can’t really finger the A string, the first string. I feel like 100 percent of the effort should your hand should be dedicated to producing music,
to have an instrument to practice on everywhere I go. I’ll sit in the car, wind the windows down, and take out my uke and work on a piece for the next show. It’s kind of a strange thing, but I would suggest walking around when you practice. I walk around the yard, I walk around the house, and I clip a metronome onto my headstock and always practice with a metronome. This way you never get bored and you never slouch; it gets your blood flowing and you get exercise at the same time. The scenery changes, which is something that I don’t take for granted because when I practice piano I stare at the same wall day after day, hour after hour. Psychologically it has the an effect on whether your’e motivated to sit down and stare at the wall for another two hours or whatever. The last thing is to practice slowly and perfectly- that I cannot impress enough. Practicing fast and making mistakes here and there, you’re just teaching yourself to make those some mistakes over and over again. It’s much harder to undo if you learn that way than if you learn it correctly the first time. So if you practice slowly, painfully but absolutely perfectly, you’ll be surprised by how much faster you can learn anything, no matter how easy or difficult. Break things down into little sections and do them slowly.
When your’e starting out, do you think it’s good to play single notes and melodies in addition to summing? not gripping the instrument and holding it up. Whenever I perform and practice and play I always use a strap so my hands are completely relaxed. Bit I never use a strap when I record.
Why Not?
Ho: The ukuleles that I record with are very fragile instruments. They’re not not something you’d take around anywhere. The back of the instrument resonates a lot, and you can’t actually stand or put a strap and hold it against your body just from touching that piece of wood. With one instrument I play, you can actually hold it up to hold it up to the light and see through the wood- you can see light because the wood is so thin. So I hold the ukulele like a classical guitar when I record: I sit it on my left left and brace it with my right leg, and I only touch the corner of it with my right forearm. It’s braced in such a way that ir doesn’t move and I can move my fingers.
You mentioned practicing, What’s your advice on getting the most out of your practice time?
Ho: I have completely fallen in lo ve with the ukulele in recent years, and I literally take it with me everywhere I go. Any scale or any song I practice on the ukulele, the technique translates directly to a guitar, bass, or anything. So it’s really helped me a lot
Ho: Yes, I think so. It’s nice to start out strumming C,F, and F, just to engage someone and say, look, you can make music in ten minutes! Once someone is intrigued in the instrument, I think the very next step is to separate out the strings and find out how much music you can make with a ukulele. My feeling about the ukulele is it can be a flashy instrument. George Formby has that strumming pattern thing and people are excited by the fast stuff stuff too, but there’s really seriously deep music you can to on a ukulele dissonant and constant harmonies and voice lading and chromatic passages. It’s not a young instrument, bit there’s not much music out for it like thee is for the piano, which has amazing repertoire created for it over hundred of years. I want to try and create more repertoire and music for ukulele players to enjoy.