Christmas carols on guitar for beginners: from two chords upwards
Carols from the catalogue, ordered from the simplest. You start on two grips, and you walk around the F chord with a capo.
Adrian9 minupdated
In December the date does not move, and nobody will move it for you. Once a year everybody around the table wants to sing, and the guitar is needed on one particular evening. So this lesson does not begin with the carol you love most. It begins with the one you will be able to play soonest.
Why the ladder is built on grips and not on popularity
Sort the carols the way people hum them and Silent Night comes first. That is the trap. Silent Night has three grips and one of them is F, the first barre chord of your life. You would start with the hardest thing in your first year of playing, and for a week you would hear buzzing instead of a carol.
Polish songbooks do it differently and they are right. In “Szybka i łatwa metoda”, the beginner method most Polish families learn from, the carols are printed in order of difficulty. What counts is how many different grips a song uses: two first, then three, then four, five and six. The title, the theme and whatever is on the radio have nothing to do with it. We do the same here, on carols from the Guitarmatic catalogue, with the strum each of them already carries.
The ladder you will climb over six lessons
| Carol | Grips | Time | Strum in the app |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two grips | |||
| Wśród nocnej ciszy | C G | 4/4 | March (Universal) |
| Three grips, no barre | |||
| Tryumfy Króla Niebieskiego | C G D | 4/4 | Folk |
| Pójdźmy wszyscy do stajenki | C G Am | 4/4 | March (Universal) |
| Three grips, one of them F | |||
| Mędrcy świata | C F G | 4/4 | Half-bar (D DU ×2) |
| Cicha Noc (Silent Night) | C G F | 3/4 | Szesnastka 3/4 (songbook) |
| Do szopy, hej pasterze | C G F | 3/4 | Waltz down down-up (3/4) |
| Five grips and more | |||
| Lulajże Jezuniu | C Dm G Am F | 3/4 | Szesnastka 3/4 (songbook) |
| Bóg się rodzi | Am D7 G E7 C D | 3/4 | Szesnastka 3/4 (songbook) |
Read the table from the top. The first rung is two grips and one strum, and a whole carol fits on it, verse and refrain. The second rung adds a third grip and still asks you to press nothing with a bar, and the third brings in F. The fourth is the repertoire you show off with once everybody else is already singing, and there is no sense starting there in your first week.
These are Polish carols, because this course is aimed at a Polish Christmas Eve table, and the melodies travel better than the titles suggest. If you want English titles on the same rungs, the catalogue has them. I Saw Three Ships sits on two grips, Jingle Bells and Silent Night on three grips with F. The ladder is identical.
Two facts I would rather not hide
The first one: many carols count in three, not in four. That is not a harder version of the same thing. It is different counting and a different strum in the right hand, because three is a waltz and four is a march. The Polish method puts songs in three off until later and says you may skip them. Then it opens its carol volume with a song in three. We do not repeat that. The waltz is lesson 3 of this course.
The second one: many carols need F. The same book tells you to pick songs without barre chords. Then it puts the first F on the fourth carol of its own difficulty order. The contradiction is in the book, not in your fingers. F has its own lesson, the fourth one, but you get the way around it today, at the bottom of this page.
The capo, or the F you never have to play
A capo is a nut you can move. It clamps every string at one fret, so each open string goes up by as many semitones as the fret number. The grips in your left hand stay exactly the same.
Out of that comes the trick this whole lesson rests on. A carol in C asks you for the grips C, F and G. Clamp the capo at the fifth fret and play the grips G, C and D instead. What comes out is C, F and G, exactly what the carol asked for, and your hand never touches a barre.
Put it on parallel to the fret, without dragging the strings sideways, and check the open strings straight afterwards. The capo does one more thing that nobody mentions at the start: it moves the whole carol under your voice. At a family table that matters more than how comfortable the grips are.
You cannot put any of this in the address bar. Open the song, switch the Key, and Guitarmatic works out which fret the capo belongs on and shows you the new grips above the words.
What confused me
I thought carols were easy because they are slow, and those are two different things. A slow tempo does give you more time to move your hand, and that part is true. But a slow tempo is also heard in more detail: every late change, every string that did not ring, every finger lying flat. A fast song forgives a mess, a carol puts it on display.
The second thing: I assumed that because I have known the tune since childhood, my hand knew it too. It does not. The melody lives in your head and the chord change lives in your fingers. It has to be built from scratch, exactly as it would be for a song I had never heard.
Do this now
Chord Changes, the pair G and C, four strums per chord.
The hand comes down from the sixth string to the fifth, and the ring finger jumps from a thin string to a thick one. The most common change around a campfire, and in the carols on the first rung the only one you have to make.
Goal: a clean round at ♩ = 72, meaning eight bars without the right hand stopping.
Play this
four carols, one from each rungThe first two stand on open grips only, so you can start them today. Jingle Bells and Silent Night both want F, and they are here so you can see where the ladder leads.
» Two grips is not a carol, it is an exercise.
Wśród nocnej ciszy has two grips, a verse and a refrain, and nobody at the table counts grips. Open it in the app, turn on the lyric highlighting and play it to the end. If your right hand is still moving after eight bars, that was not an exercise.
Read more
- Szybka i łatwa metoda gry na gitarze: Kolędy i piosenki świąteczneProste Nuty, Kraków 2024, pages 12 to 88The book prints the whole repertoire in order of how many grips each song needs, carol after carol. It is in Polish, but the chord charts read in any language.
- The Only Guitar Book You'll Ever NeedErnie Jackson and Marc Schonbrun, chapter “Capos”The authors give a capo transposition table, so you can read off which grip at which fret sounds as what.
- Learning to Play GuitarColin McAllister, lecture 18The lecture explains the capo as a movable nut, and it sets an exercise on the grips G, C and D.
- Christmas carolWikipedia, in EnglishThe article says where carols come from, and it has a section on the Polish kolęda if you want to know what you are playing.
- Capo (musical device)Wikipedia, in EnglishThis is the only place that lists the drawbacks honestly: spring pressure, the effect on tuning, and the risk of scratching the neck.