Reader digest merry christmas songbook how to#
Reader digest merry christmas songbook full#

If you want to up the ante, you could play left-hand octaves instead of single notes. Note that you don’t need to be able to read or understand chords to do this – you just need to be able to follow the letters! If it says “Gm” I’ll play a G, and so on. The easiest way to do this is to simply play a single note in the left hand.įor example, if my chord says “F” or “Fdim”, I’ll just play a single F in the left hand. To keep things really simple, I’m going to use the chord symbols as a guideline for my bass notes. Once I get better at playing it, I might add some harmony notes in here and there. To start, I often omit any right-hand notes that aren’t the melody. If you’re working with a fake book and want to add “voicing” to your melody, you generally want to add those harmony notes underneath the melody. This is because the top note is the most easily heard. Luckily, the melody is easy to find – it’s always going to be the top note. In an arrangement like ours, there are two- and three-note intervals. If you have a Christmas Fake Book, this’ll be easy – there’ll only be one line of written music, and it’ll be the melody.

O Little Town of Bethlehem serves as a good starting point, since it’s short and sweet, and there aren’t any crazy left-hand patterns. Experiment #1: O Little Town of Bethlehem One other downside of this book, though, is the vocal parts are often extremely high, but that’s what a transpose button is for! You could transpose on the spot, too, but that’s obviously a bigger challenge. I do think many of the arrangements in this book are quite beautiful, and some of them I’ve learned faithfully (like The Christmas Song). Still, I’ve been using this book with my students for years, and you can edit the arrangements to be as easy (or not) as you want them to be.

Reader digest merry christmas songbook full#

They’re full of big chords and huge leaps – not for the feint of heart. The downside of this book is that the arrangements are intense. I like that the arrangements are all on 1-2 pages, which makes it much easier to sing and play from (no constant page-flipping!).

The Christmas book that I’ll be using for this video is The Reader’s Digest Merry Christmas Songbook. The Reader’s Digest Merry Christmas Songbook

Reader digest merry christmas songbook how to#

How to use the given chord symbols while following the bassline idea.

Here’s what we’re going to talk about in Part 1 of this video: But the thing with Christmas piano music is that you need time to practice it! So I thought I would start talking about Christmas music now, to help you get prepared for the upcoming season. Most people are far from putting up the Christmas tree.