First Song
As Christmas approaches, so does the need for easy Christmas songs to play on the guitar. This post is right on the heels of an earlier post Easy Christmas Songs for Guitar. Below, you’ll find 5 additional beginner Christmas songs that can also help you learn to play the guitar. Two of these songs are easy fingerstyle arrangements if you would prefer to play the melody instead of sing it.
Silent Night – Easy Version
This is the easiest song in the post. It only uses three chords and the strum pattern is all down strums. If you haven’t learned these chords yet, I’d recommend that you check out my guitar lesson: The First Seven Songs I Teach All Of My Beginning Guitar Students.
After I’ve taught my students how to play C, G & G7. I move onto teaching D7. If this wasn’t a Christmas song, I would have been sure to include it my second guitar lesson tutorial: Easy Songs For Guitar Using Chords G, C, and D7 which includes many other songs using these same chords.
Silent Night – Alternating Bass
Silent night is in 3/4 time. 3/4 time means that there are three beats in every measure. When playing alternating bass in 3/4 time, you first play the lowest string in the chord and then strum down twice. If the chord continues on for another measure, you then play another low note in the chord (a secondary bass note) and strum twice again. It’s kind of like adding a bass part into your song and it really helps improve the quality of the guitar part. You can find an entire tutorial on Alternating Bass on my post Learn To Play Alternating Bass.
Because Alternating Bass a great accompaniment technique to first teach using easy chords – I will sometimes teach this version to my students who are a little further along in their learning.
Second Song
Away In A Manger – Easy Fingerstyle Guitar Tab
Away In A Manger is a great way to introduce fingerstyle guitar to beginning guitar students. I have my students work on learning tablature from the beginning, so they are often ready for something like this after a few months of playing. Another great easy fingerstyle guitar arrangement I have on the website is Happy Birthday.
This is a fingerstyle arrangement, because it you’ll have to play a low string and a high string at the same time. Although you can designate which right hand finger to use for each string – I often don’t ask my students to do that with the first few songs. Any right hand finger will work for the high strings and the thumb works best for the low strings.
Third Song
We Wish You A Merry Christmas – Alternating Bass
Similar to Silent Night, this song is also in 3/4 time and uses alternating bass as the accompaniment technique. What’s different about this song is the number of open chords used. If some of these chords look unfamiliar, you may want to first check out my posts: Learn Chords D & A7 and Easy Guitar Songs With Minor Chords.
Fourth Song
Deck The Halls – An easy song to help you learn the F Chord
Once my students have gotten comfortable with most of the open chords found on the chord chart below, I introduce them to small barre chords, starting with the F chord.
If it’s not December, I’ll usually introduce them to songs found in my post Easy Songs To Help You Learn The F Chord. But, ’tis the season – so instead I’ll give them Deck The Halls.
Fifth Song
O Christmas Tree – Easy Fingerstyle Guitar Tab
As I search for guitar music for my students online, I often find that there isn’t a good selection of music for the beginner level. I find this to definitely be the case when it comes to fingerstyle tablature. Because of this, I often arrange my own. I often give this songs to students after they’ve learned Away In A Manger (above).
