If you’re new to fingerpicking, this will feel really awkward at first. This means your thumb plucks the top string, your index finger plucks the second to top string, your middle finger plucks the second to bottom string, and your ring finger plucks the bottom string.

I talked about assigning each of the fingers on your picking hand to a string. There is one thing I’d like to highlight from the video. If you want to learn how to fingerpick, or if you just want to know of a way to play “Hallelujah,” then I think you’ll enjoy this video. I thought it’d make a good ukulele fingerpicking lesson. I’ve received some questions from you all on how to play the fingerpicking pattern that I was using for the song. We’ll close this lesson with a passage reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s take on this timeless Cohen song, which he reshaped from John Cale’s cover version.A few weeks ago, I did a cover of a song written by Leonard Cohen called “Hallelujah” on the ukulele. His (now) most famous song, “Hallelujah,” purportedly had upward of 80 verses before it was whittled down to the single-digit verse version known today. A perfectionist to an arguable fault, Cohen often took years to perfect his verses before they ever saw the light of day. Its mellow, “pianistic” fingerstyle groove serves up assorted chords in B minor-with a “surprise” chord, C#m (borrowed from the B Dorian mode).įIGURE 4 presents a similarly styled phrase. (There’s also a must-hear Danny Gatton version of the tune). 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate contains the longstanding fan favorite “Famous Blue Raincoat,” later covered by Jennifer Warnes, Joan Baez, Tori Amos and Lucinda Williams.

Its origins date back to the early Sixties when Cohen, then living on the Greek island Hydra, dug the sight of a bird perched on the island’s newly installed telephone wires.įIGURE 3 similarly depicts the song’s signature fingerstyle pattern.

“Bird on the Wire,” regarded as one of Cohen’s signature songs (now a vocal standard, covered by everyone from Joe Cocker and Johnny Cash to the Neville Brothers and Willie Nelson, and even Joe Bonamassa), appears on Cohen’s Songs from a Room, released in 1969. This same approach is also used to fret F#m in “The Stranger Song,” a blazing Flamenco-inspired piece, also on Cohen’s debut album, which informs FIGURE 2. FIGURE 1 similarly depicts the tune’s repeating one-bar fingerpicking pattern to shift from E to G#m, keep the open E chord’s finger shape in place on the A and D strings and, instead of switching to a conventional G#m barre-chord shape, shift your middle and ring fingers up to the sixth fret, barre the index finger and use your pinkie to fret the note added on the G string on beat three of bar 2. After its appearance on Judy Collins’ 1966 album, In My Life, Cohen’s “Suzanne” served as the opening track on his 1967 debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen.

Hallelujah fingerpicking