I lava you ukulele

Learn to play the rather brilliant Lava on ukulele from Pixar’s 2014 short movie of the same name. It’s a beautiful song and really easy to learn. Read on for help with the strumming pattern, chords and song structure.

Lava is a 7 minute computer animated short movie released by Pixar in 2014. It tells the story of a lonely volcano named Uku. That’s as much as I’ll say as I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t already seen it. It features a beautiful song (also called Lava), if you haven’t heard it check out this video…

3 Chord Trick

There are just 3 chords in the song Lava and they should all be pretty familiar if you ever picked up a ukulele before. Those chords are C, F and G7.

The beauty of Lava is that it’s a very easy song to play, the chords are simple and the strumming is fairly relaxed. Kuana Torres Kahele and Napua Greig do a great job on the vocals – if only I could sing like that!

Lava Strumming Pattern

You’ll see a lot of tutorials telling you the strumming pattern for Lava is D DU UDU which misses out the 3rd down strum. They’re wrong, you can clearly hear the 3rd down strum when you listen. The actual pattern is D DUDUDU but the dynamics that are used soften some of the those strums so it doesn’t sound quite so rigid.

Here’s what that pattern looks like…

It’s a really simple song but when you listen to it you’ll notice some subtleties in the dynamics that stop it sounding too one-dimensional. It’s a great example of what can be done with a very simple song. Once you get comfortable playing it through spend some time on getting those subtleties in your version too.

Lava Song Structure

There are only 2 real sections to get to grips with. The intro/verse and the chorus. There’s nothing too tricky going on with them but here’s the structure.

Intro/Verse

C  C  G7  G7  F  F  C  G7  G7

Which sounds something like…

Chorus

F  F  C  C  G7  G7  C  C  F  F  C  C  F  G7  C  C

Which sounds like…

Essentially you’re playing 2 measures of each chord with the exception of the 3rd C in the intro/verse and the 5th F in the chorus.

Half way through the song the tempo slows down but you’re still playing the same chords and the same strumming pattern.

That’s pretty much it!

Strum Like A Pro

If you really want to progress your strumming at a rapid rate then I’d highly recommend taking a look at Al Wood’s downloadable ebook How To Play Ukulele Strums. For just $12 you get an in-depth guide showing you how to play 49 different strums with supporting videos and MP3 files. There’s also a really useful section that focuses on counting strums the easy way (something I wish I had when I was learning to play).

Buy How To Play Ukulele Strums

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