How to play carols in three: the waltz on guitar

The carols you know from childhood do not all count in four. Silent Night, Do szopy hej pasterze, Lulajże Jezuniu, Bóg się rodzi: every one of them goes in three. Play them the way you played Wśród nocnej ciszy in the previous lesson and they come out crooked. The worst part is that it is not obvious why.

What it means that a carol goes in three

A bar is a handful of beats, and the time signature says how many. In four you count one two three four and go back to the start. In three you count one two three, and there is nothing more to it. The Polish beginner method boils this down to one sentence, and the sentence works: three is a waltz, four is a march.

A march goes forward, step after step, on two legs. A waltz rocks, because three cannot be split into two equal halves and one beat is always left over. That is why the first beat of a bar in three is clearly heavier than the other two. The bar sways sideways instead of marching.

You can test it without a guitar. Put on Silent Night and count out loud, one two three, one two three. If “one” lands on the same syllable every time, you are counting right. If it drifts after four bars, you are counting in four, and that is where the mess comes from.

Six movements first, the pattern second

Before any pattern arrives, the right hand has to start rocking. Six movements per bar: down on one, up on the “and”, down on two, up, down on three, up. All six hit the strings. This is not a strum yet, it is a warm-up, and the Polish method insists on it before anything else.

In the app it is called Waltz down-up (3/4) and you turn it on in Guitar strums. It stays with you longer than one lesson: it is the frame every strum in three is built on. Even eighths are the same frame for everything in four.

The basic waltz: one gap makes the whole difference

Now take one stroke away, right after “one”. The hand still makes all six movements, it just misses the strings in that one place and nothing sounds. This is the same rule as the march strum in the previous lesson: a pattern is made by subtraction, not by learning a new movement.

What is left is: down on one, silence, down on two, up on the “and”, down on three, up on the “and”. In plain words: down, down-up, down-up, which is exactly what the drawing at the top of the page shows. In the app the pattern is called Waltz down down-up (3/4) and it sits under all four songs in the list below.

One measure tells you it is working, and it comes straight from the Polish method. You count to three, and “one” is audibly heavier than two and three. If all three strokes weigh the same, the pattern is technically correct and musically dead.

When the chord changes in a bar of three

In carols that go in three the chord usually holds a whole bar, or two. Wlazł kotek na płotek has one chord per bar and no change in the middle at all. Do szopy, hej pasterze holds every chord for two bars, which is six beats. That is more time to move your hand than a bar of four gives at the same tempo.

A rule worth keeping: first look at how many bars one chord holds, and only then at whether anything happens inside the bar. The first tells you how much time your hand gets, and the second is rare.

When a change does land inside the bar, it lands on “three”, not on “two”. Archanioł Boży Gabriel does that in half of its bars, and in one place it squeezes three chords into a single bar, one per beat. That is why it sits at the end of the list below rather than the start.

Tapping only comes in four, so the ladder looks different

Honestly: the Rhythm exercise has three tapping patterns and all of them are in four. There is nothing in three to tap and nothing to measure. So the ladder for the waltz works differently. Set the metronome to 3/4 so the click accents “one”, and open Guitar strums on the waltz so the hand can follow.

The metronome does not take a time signature from the address, so you set the three on screen. Two seconds of work, and the one place here where the app will not do it for you.

What confused me

For my first Christmas I played everything in four, because that was all I had, and I blamed the words. The syllables did not seem to fit, the carol seemed oddly written, somebody had got it wrong. Nobody had. I was adding a fourth stroke because my hand knew it, and every bar I stole a third of a second from the melody. After eight bars the singing and the guitar were in two different places.

The second thing is small and it cost me an evening. In the book I learned from, the waltz in the teaching section has no final up-arrow, and every song page in it has one. I compared the two and decided I was missing something. Here one pattern has one definition and one drawing: the basic waltz is always the same six fields at the top of this page.