“Stand By Me” is one of those songs that everyone knows, whether they’ve ever sat down to listen to it or not. You can’t escape it!

On the ukulele, this song only has a few chords, so you shouldn’t get tripped up too badly there - C, Am, F, and G. That said, there are a few fun chord variations you can experiment with!

The real fun comes in with the strumming. When it’s just you playing an instrument, sometimes you’ve got to get creative so as to mimic a fuller sound without a band behind you. That’s where the percussive hits come in! This really just involves you hitting the body of your ukulele with the palm of your strumming hand, but try hitting it with different parts of your hand and in different parts of the instrument’s body to see what kind of sounds you get. Find which one sounds best to you and stick with it! Practice getting the hit sound consistent each time you do it.