Blue Christmas by Elvis Presley Tutorial/Lesson
Blue Christmas
E, B7, E7, A, A7, F#7
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Video transcript
foreign it's Ellen here and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Blue Christmas by Elvis Presley on the guitar so stay tuned to this is something that you'd like to learn and really quick before we jump into the tutorial I wanted to take a second to thank today's sponsor star favor I'll actually be featuring their 60s Relic electric guitar in this video today as you can see this guitar is giving off super vintage Vibes with all of the chipped Paint The Faded lacquer the worn fretboard and things like that this is all stuff that was very intentional on Star Faber they created this guitar model to look as if it is from the 60s um however if you were to get an actual vintage 60s guitar they usually cost somewhere in the several thousands or tens of thousands of dollars or even if you were to go the custom shop route those can still cost thousands of dollars but with star favor you can get a similar look for a fraction of the price as you can see we have a strat style solid body and the pickups here are single coil pickups and they're specifically modeled after that kind of vintage 60s sound something else I was super impressed with was this guitar actually came with a vintage guitar case as well so the whole thing really fits that aesthetic if that's something that you're going after beyond that the rest of these specs are very similar to a normal Strat and I'll link all of that down below so if you are interested in this star favorite guitar I'll make sure to have their link to their Amazon store in my description box as well as in this I card right up here so I'm going to go ahead and categorize this song as beginner friendly but first of all let's talk about our guitar you will need it to be in standard tuning and you do not need a capo to play this in the original key I have six chord shapes to show you to play through this song and none of them are bar chords which is awesome as well as two strumming patterns that you can use to play through the entire thing so with all of that being said let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial and we'll start with the chords alright guys so like I said we have six chord shapes and we're going to start with our E major which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts that you're seeing on screen I Do cover how to do that in my free beginners course right here on YouTube and episode three so I'll make sure to link that video right here for those of you who need it the next chord is our B7 next is E7 after that we have our a chord then we have our A7 and the last chord you need to know is F sharp seven and those are the six chords you need to know to play the song now as I always say if you're new to guitar go ahead and pause the video and just take a few minutes to memorize those chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them it'll make learning the rest of the song that much easier but once you've done that we can go ahead and jump into the strumming patterns that I would suggest for this song all right guys so jumping right into it the first strumming pattern I would suggest as you can see is just down down up down up down up and it's going to sound like this so hopefully you could hear a little bit of That Bouncy vibe that this strumming pattern has going on so the way we would count this is with kind of a triplet Rhythm so instead of one and two and three and four and we're going to count it one and a two and a three and a four and a and so those up strums are going to be leading into the next down strum so the overall rhythm is one two three a four uh okay so that up strum leads into the next one down down up down up down up that's going to give it that really laid back 60s kind of vibe whenever we're playing this so let's go ahead and put our E chord on and play through this for a few measures together and I want you to just jump in whenever you feel like you have the Rhythm down one and a two and a ready go down down up down up down down up down up down awesome so if you can kind of get that Rhythm internalized you basically are going to be using that for the entire song There is one part where we're going to change up our strumming just a little bit but first of all let's go ahead and get used to this strumming pattern with the chord transition so I'm going to go ahead and bring up the first first and first chorus and all you want to do is play through this pattern two times for each of these chords so we're starting on our e we have down down up down up down up twice then you go to your next chord B7 down up down up down up twice then you're going to stay here on B7 your time then go back to your E chord down down up down up down up twice make it how about you down down up down up down up all right you're gonna take this strumming pattern and put it back into the chorus as well so it's going to stretch almost over the entire song so with our chorus we have our E7 we're going down down up down up twice then we go to our a chord down down up down up and then right here is kind of like a little bit of a walk down and this is where we're gonna do our second strumming pattern so let's go ahead and talk about strumming pattern too and really quick before we go over the second strumming pattern I wanted to take the other sponsor for today's video Black Mountain thumb picks so this is what I've been wearing on my thumb as I've been playing through this song So if you're curious about it I will have more information and links in the description box down below alright so for strumming pattern two as you can see it's just down down up down down up and it's gonna sound like this foreign and before we go any further I'm just going to add a little vertical line halfway in between and basically what that's going to represent is where we're changing chords so on the left half of the vertical line is one chord and on the right half is the other chord and this is only going to be used like basically one time in the song when we do this little walk down but here in the first chorus we're going from our a chord to our A7 chord and all you want to do is apply strumming pattern two so on your a chord you're going to do the first half down down up and then on A7 you're going to finish it out down down up all right so going back to the beginning of that line we have our E7 chord on strumming pattern one down down up down up down up twice to a down up down up down up and then here we're gonna do strumming pattern two a down up a seven down up all right that's basically the only part of the song that you'll be using this strumming patterns if you don't like it or you don't like that walk down you could just keep that a chord going for the full first strumming pattern in which case you could just use the first strumming pattern for the whole song but anyways without stopping that chorus sounds like this E7 twice a down down up down down up then you would continue with your F sharp seven and go back to strumming pattern one down down up down up down up twice to D7 all right so that whole course sounds like this Christmas tree all right and then on that B7 chord I like to do one full strumming pattern down down up down up down up and then just come in with a single down strum because there you'll go back into the verse blue and then you would go back into the strumming pattern okay with all of that being said let's go ahead and put everything together to play through the whole song this morning if you're having fun and want to jam out to the rest of this song with me make sure to check out the link to my full play along tutorial available on my patreon page it is absolutely free and I will make sure to link it in the description box down below as well as this I card up here unfortunately when I play through full songs here on YouTube it does have a habit of getting copyrighted which hurts my channel so I did move that over to my patreon page but like I said it is free and while you're over there you can also download a printable guide for the song it has everything that I taught in this tutorial the chords the strawberry patterns the lyrics and everything on a printable guide for you so that is free as well so make sure to check that out I will link those in the description box as well as in these I cards that you'll see pop up on screen but um that does conclude the video for today so thank you so much for watching if it helped you make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new guitar tutorials another thank you goes out to Star favor and Black Mountain picks for sponsoring today's video and I also wanted to give a special shout out to my top patrons over on my patreon page I'll make sure to list all of their names on screen right now and of course the thank you goes out to all of my patrons for supporting my channel and making videos just like it's impossible you guys are awesome here are my social media sites in case you'd like to follow me on any of those that's just where I do fun things like behind the scenes looks the things that I'm working on I'll pull you guys on what you want to learn next and I'll even do giveaways on there a few times a year so make sure to check it out but I think that ends the video so thank you so much for watching I really hope that this helped and I hope you have a really happy holiday bye thank you