The Stone Roses were a different breed. They get lumped into the whole Madchester/Britpop era but for me, they were so much more than that. If they managed to keep up the momentum of their sublime debut album, they would have reached the levels of Pink Floyd in my opinion. Super crafted songs and executed flawlessly. Let’s learn to play Waterfall, Fools Gold and I Wanna Be Adored on the ukulele.
What Are We Learning To Play?
The tabs are from a fun little video I made for my TikTok account recently. It’s pretty much showcasing the various levels of playing difficulty for the Stone Roses. It starts easy and ends on a super challenging riff. Scroll to give some of them a shot.
Ukulele Tabs
Easy – Waterfall
Although this is the easiest of this bunch of songs. It still can be tricky if you are a novice as we are using a technique called barring.
After you have strummed those first 3 chords. You need to use your first finger and place that against the bottom three strings on the 6th fret. Then your ring and pinky finger need to be almost glued together and hitting both 9th frets on the E and A. Even when you left them off, naturally the two fingers should stick together. That will leave your middle finger available to play the rest of the notes on the E string.
A|-4-4-4-|---9----------------|---9----------------|
E|-4-4-4-|-----9---7-7-6-7----|-----9---7-7-6-7----|
C|-5-5-5-|-6-----6------------|-6-----6------------|
G|-6-6-6-|--------------------|--------------------|
Medium – Fools Gold
This is the only riff on the list that requires a low G string to play effectively. You also want to try and apply a palm muting technique throughout the whole song. That will dampen the sound and give you a little bit more control over playing it.
Try to play each note quickly and with a stabby nature. Fast and short and you will keep the natural groove of the song. There are lots of p’s in this tab, they stand for pull-off. Check out this guide for some in-depth advice on how to perform and practise pull-offs.
Hard – I Wanna Be Adored
This tab is split into two sections. Firstly we have the Mani’s bassline that’s running throughout the majority of the song. I feel like there may be times when John Squire is playing this on top of the bass too. Regardless, it’s an instantly recognizable bass line so it’s worth a pop on the ukulele too.
It’s all fairly straightforward up until the 5h7p5 on the tab. If you are looking at that confused, don’t be. All you need to do is pluck the string with your first finger on the 5th fret. Then use your ring finger to hammer-on to the 7th and pull it off again with a dragging motion.
A|---------5-5-5-5---------5h7p5-7-----7-----7/9-----7/9-7-5---------|
E|-3-3-3-3---------3-3-3-3---------0-0---0-0-----0-0---------7-------|
C|-------------------------------------------------------------------|
G|-------------------------------------------------------------------|
Secondly, we have that insane guitar solo/intro. This is deservedly and correctly in its place on under the hard section. It took me a good hour or so to work up the speed to play it along to the original track. I’m not able to supply any kind of rhythmic information on the tabs so you going to have to listen to it multiple times to get the hang of it. You could even watch the YouTube video below and play it at half speed.
A|-9-12-14-12-9-12-9-7----7-----------------|
E|---------------------10---10-7-5-7-10-7-5-|
C|------------------------------------------|
G|------------------------------------------|
A|-14-----------------------------------------------------|
E|----12-10----14---------10-14-----------10------10------|
C|----------11----11-9-11----------9-9-11----9-11----11-9-|
G|--------------------------------------------------------|
If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested to see my ukulele arrangement of the debut album by the Stone Roses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWRlUU6hPHc
Not sure how to read these tabs?
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