Wśród nocnej ciszy: two chords and the whole text

Wśród nocnej ciszy is a Polish carol whose title means “in the silence of the night”: shepherds are woken and sent to Bethlehem. In our catalogue it uses two grips. C and G, nothing else, through the verse and the refrain. That is why it sits on the first rung of the ladder from the previous lesson, and why you can actually play it this week.

The carol is older than anything else in this course. It appeared around the turn of the nineteenth century, and its text was first printed in 1853. The author is unknown.

Where the chord change falls

The easiest trap here is this one: you change chord whenever a new line of text begins. That is not how it works. The chord follows the bar, not the sentence, and in the verse it changes mid-bar, on the third beat.

Here is the first pass, bar by bar: bar number, first half of the bar, second half. A bold letter marks where a chord starts; where there is none, the same chord keeps ringing.

Bar	One and two	Three and four
Verse
1	C Wśród	G noc-nej
2	C ci-	G szy
3	C głos się	G roz-cho-
4	G dzi	no change
5	C Wstań-	G cie pas-
6	C te-	G rze
7	C Bóg się	G wam ro-
8	C dzi	no change
Refrain
9	C Czym prę-	dzej się
10	G wy-bie-	raj-cie
11	C Do Bet-	le-jem
12	G po-śpie-	szaj-cie
13	C Przy-wi-	G tać Pa-
14	C na	no change
15	C Przy-wi-	G tać Pa-
16	G na	no change

The verse and the refrain work differently, and there lies the only difficulty in this carol. In the verse the left hand moves twice per bar, so each change gets two beats. In the refrain the chord holds whole bars and your hand has time, and then the work returns in bar 13. If anything falls apart, it falls apart there.

The carol has more verses than this table holds, and all of them run over the same chords. Learn one and you know them all. The app carries the first verse with the refrain, and you sing the rest from memory.

How to count in four

Before you touch a string, count out loud: one, two, three, four, and again. Then tap the body of the guitar and keep counting. Only then put your left hand on the neck. That order sounds like a waste of time. It is the shortest road to a change that does not eat the first beat of the next bar.

In the app the carol sits at ♩ = 96, which is the singing tempo, not the learning tempo. Take the tempo down until the change from C to G stops chasing you, then climb back up. The pitch does not move, only the speed.

The march strum: eight movements, four hits

In the app this carol has the March (Universal) strum set on it. It goes like this: down on one, silence on two, down on three, down on four and up right after four.

The whole of strumming rests on this, and nobody told me for a month. The hand moves through all eight movements: down on the numbers, up on the “and”. You hit the strings in four places out of eight, and the other four movements happen above the strings. You are not learning a new rhythm, you are learning to stop touching the strings.

Three steps, in this order

First the change on its own, with no words and no pattern: four downstrokes on C, four on G, round and round, slowly. The right hand must not slow down at the moment the fingers move. That is the only thing you measure here, and the Chord Changes exercise measures the same.

Then the march strum, but on one chord. Eight bars of nothing but C, until the movement is even. Only then put the two together and add the words, bar by bar from the table above. If the strum falls apart once the words arrive, go back to one chord. That is not a retreat, it is how you find out which hand let you down.

The last step happens in the app. Open the song, turn on lyric highlighting and play a whole verse with it. It shows the syllable you are on, so you see at once whether you are half a bar late or only think you are.

A capo to fit your voice

If the carol sits too low or too high for you, do not change the grips. Open the song, switch the Key, and Guitarmatic works out the capo and shows the new grips above the words. Your fingers do the same thing, the singing gets easier, and around a family table that matters more than anything else.

What confused me

I changed chord at the start of a line, because that is what a songbook page looks like. The chord name sits above the first word of the line. Then I played along with a recording and nothing lined up. The chord follows the bar, and the bar does not ask where a sentence ends. In bar 3 the change lands in the middle of the word “rozchodzi”, and it belongs there.

The second thing: since nothing changes in bar 4, I decided my hand could rest. It rested and it did not come back in time. The right hand never stops, not even when one chord runs through a whole bar. A bar without a change is there so your head can rest, not your hand.