When you are first starting out on any instrument, it can feel like a constant fight to stay sane and keep all the various terms and symbols in your head. Nowhere is this more true than in the act of learning and memorising chords. For those such as the Fm ukulele chord, because they are found less often in the songs we want to learn, we can be more drawn to simply neglecting them, favouring the chords we might more often found, like C and G and A and Am etc etc.
However, to neglect such chords is to do so at the expense of your development, whether as an artist, a musician, a composer, or simply as a music enthusiast; you would surely be short selling yourself not to learn as many chords as possible at this stage, even if it means some further frustrations with these infernal chords!
When lingering in the bouts of frustration at this stage, it might be useful simply to think about the amount of new contexts you might insert the Fm ukulele chord into, all of the compositional and improvisational opportunities once you have the theory and the practise under your belt, the same going for any number of chords you might have treated in a similar way in the past!
How to Play the Fm Ukulele Chord
Using the minor scale formula we can deduce from the root note of F that the minor 3rd is Ab or G# and that the perfect 5th is in fact C. The same is almost exactly true for the major triad F major, the parallel major as it’s called, though with the difference lying in the augmented (sharpened) 3rd from minor to major.
Fm Ukulele Chord Variation #1
This is the first variation of the Fm ukulele chord, what many would refer to as the root position, what with it being so close to the bottom of the fret board:
This shouldn’t present any difficulties to any aspiring and beginner ukulele enthusiasts, even those transitioning from guitar, for the shape will be spectrally familiar to those who have learnt any amount of guitar.
Fm Ukulele Chord Variation #2
Here we see the second variation, so called for coming after this first root position, and likely fulfilling a similar position in terms of importance:
This shouldn’t present any difficulties to any aspiring and beginner ukulele enthusiasts, even those transitioning from guitar, for the shape will be spectrally familiar to those who have learnt any amount of guitar, similar as it is the C/G shape as performed on a guitar.
Fm Ukulele Chord Variation #3
Here is our final variation, which funnily enough uses the same root note as the previous variation, so should provide even less difficulty really:
This shouldn’t present any difficulties to any aspiring and beginner ukulele enthusiasts, even those transitioning from guitar, for the shape will be spectrally familiar to those who have learnt any amount of guitar, similar as it is the A barre shape as performed on a guitar. Just like this shape, this too is highly transposable., so get busy with it.
Final Tones
So, there you have it, a fairly comprehensive guide through the fabric of the minor triad Fm ukulele chord. I hope that this has been of some real use for you in navigating what will undoubtedly be a useful chord in your compositional and / or improvisational ventures.
FAQs Fm Ukulele Chord
This, like many parts of learning an instrument as freeing and democratising as the ukulele or guitar, is likely to vary wildly from person to person. What might be challenging to some will undoubtedly be relatively simple for others, and what may in fact be simple for some will no doubt be rather complicated and radical for others, and so on. Typically the Bb ukulele chord is a crux of a chord for the ukulele, one of the first in which all four fingers are engaged in fretting a string to sound out a note, requiring that each is placed perfectly in order for the sound to resonate as it should. This is a particularly difficult chord for those with arthritis or carpal tunnel syndrome or the like. Inversely, this can be an easy chord for other demographics, and so on and so forth.
