How to play Boy with the Arab Strap by Belle and Sebastian

Update: Ukulelehunt.com has the chords and lyrics up for this song here. We decided to collaborate on an area where our musical tastes collide, and I hope we do again. As he makes note of at the link, Woodshed at ukulelehunt.com also figured out an interesting addition: by playing Cmaj7 and D6 instead of just D and C, this song has a sustained B note in every chord, which is apparently what the piano does in the original version. Cool.

This is one of the most rockin'est songs Belle and Sebastian songs ever made. It's not as mellow as their other stuff, but his Scotsman voice sounds great over a rock beat and a good bassline. I love the clap as part of the beat.

It's a simple song to learn, at least in terms of chords. It has just G, C, and D and the chord switches are slow. This song is all aboot rhythm. Unfortunately I don't have a good source for the chords yet, because everywhere online has incomplete chords.

The good people over at ukulelehunt.com figured out that the missing chord in the online chord list was a "D", so if they put up a version of this song I will post a link.

My tutorial video:

Video breakdown:
0:00 - Intro
0:12 - Tuning (GCEA)
0:25 - Chords (G,C,D)
1:05 - Strumming pattern (details below)
2:55 - Chord switch timing
3:21 - Demonstration (slow to faster w/ lyrics)

The difficult part here is the strumming pattern. Using my normal way of describing it as beats, where each beat is an up or a down strum, there are two "sections" of the strumming, which look like this:

Section 1:
1) down
2) up
3) hit
4) up

Section 2:
5) miss
6) up
7) hit
8) up

Then, once you can do those sections individually, the entire pattern loops like this:

Strumming pattern:
1) Section 1
2) Section 2
3) Section 2
4) Section 2
(Repeat twice then switch chords)

That was kind of hard to explain, but hopefully it made sense especially if it goes along with the video. If not, please let me know in the comments and I will try to fix it.