Hey! help with a few songs?

[lovesmesumcake]

Hey! I just got my first mando two weeks ago, and I love it. But, being a beginner, of course I want to play all my favorite songs with no practice at all, and of course I can't figure them out on my own.

My main concern is Arcade Fire's "Keep the Car Running." I love that song, but have not been able to find anything close to consistency between tabs. Does anyone know that song, and know the chords in it? I'm pretty sure there's only three or four chords in the whole song.

Another great song is Beirut's "Postcards from Italy." I know it's played on a uke, but I'd love to learn it for mando (or at least the intro). Thanks!

By the way, the website's been a great resource!

[Andrew DeMarco]

Welcome to the world of mandos. I just downloaded the newest Beirut album, The Flying Cup Club. Check it out. It's excellent.

Postcards from Italy is
Verse: F A F A F A etc

The chorus is: Bb F Dm / C / Bb F / Dm C

You can make it sounds like how the dude zach whatever plays it by not playing the high E, and hammering on the A string etc... you can figure it out from there. Then for the chord change to A play an open a like 2200. I dunno, see how that works out.

I'm not familiar with the Keep the car running song, but Ultimate-guitar purports to have the chords here:
http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/tabs....crd.htm

also, I think I remember there are some youtube vids for this song where you can see the fingerings on the uke, which can easily be transposed for mando

[lovesmesumcake]

Thanks for the help!

The UltimateGuitar tab says the main chord in Keep the Car Running is D5, but for some reason that just doesn't sound right to me when I play it...

[Andrew DeMarco]

A regular D, closed or open, sounds fine to me with the song.

An open D is (from bass to trebel) 2002, a closed one 2452.

It's my understanding that a 5 chord means you just play the root and the fifth, excluding the 3rd. So it's just an interval. If you want to play more than two strings, then, you're doubling notes. That's basically what you have with an open D... just don't play the E string (200x) ADAx. If you wanna play all the strings you could easily triple the A 2005, or this really pretty D5, 2 0 0 10.

There are bunches of other combinations. Just play around.