Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid 20 Tutorial/Lesson
Do They Know It's Christmas?
C, F, G, Dm, Am
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Video transcript
hey everyone it's Ellen here and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play do they know it's Christmas by Band-Aid 20 on the guitar so here's a quick overview of everything I'll be covering in this tutorial today and with that being said let's go ahead and get started all right guys so you only need to know five different chords to play through this song and we're going to start with our C major which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts you're seeing on screen I Do cover how to do that in my free beginner Series right here on YouTube so make sure to check that out right there the next chord is our F major however if you are a beginner or you're somebody who's struggling with bar chords you could replace this with your F over C instead the next chord you need to know is our G major after that we have our D minor and then the last chord you need to know is our a minor and those are the only five chords you need to know to play through this song so go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them cuz it'll make learning the rest of the song so much easier and if this is a skill you're currently struggling with I do have an entire practice with me playlist right here on YouTube where we go through this skill in real time together so I'll make sure to link that in the corner for those of you who need it but once you have these chords under your belt then we can go ahead and talk about the strumming that I would recommend for this song all right guys so for strumming for this song as you can see we're going to be counting it in an eighth note pattern so it's going to sound like this we have 1 and two and three and four and 1 and two and three and four and down down up up down down up up down up all right and basically what you want to do is you're going to use this pattern and play it one time through per chord throughout the song um there are going to be a few places where we're ending a phrase and we're going to repeat this pattern twice per chord so let's go ahead and look at the very beginning on that first verse this is a good example of that we're starting here on our F chord you're going to play this pattern through once so we have down down up up down up to our G chord down down up up down up and then here on C we're going to play this for two measures so you're going to repeat this pattern twice so we have down down up up down up twice all right so that's most of the beginning there so if you string it all together it'll sound like this we've got f g c Twice It's Christmas time there's no need to be afraid at Christmas time and we finish sh all right um so in my little guide that you can download for free on my patreon page I will notate how many times we need to repeat certain chords and things like that um but basically this pattern you can use throughout the entire song the one place that is going to be a little bit different are those occasions where we want to play two chords within one measure okay so in that case we are going to have to change the pattern up just a little bit so I'm going to go ahead and do that now I'm taking the first half of our strumming pattern and repeating it for the second half so now instead of down down up up down up we have down down up down down up all right and again you only want to use this second strumming pattern whenever we're changing chords a little bit more frequently so a good example of that is at the very end where they repeat Feed the World let them know it's Christmas time right there we're going from our C to our F and then C so what you want to do is on the first measure the C chord we're going to stick to strumming pattern one and do the full measure down down up up down up then when we're splitting the F and the C in the next measure each of those is only going to get half the measure so on our F chord we've got down down up and our c chord we've got down down up all right so that's what this little line in the middle is this vertical line that's just where you're going to change chords okay so let's go ahead and go over that entire line at the end the feed the world we've got C down down up up down up then we split f c down down up down up and then same with a minor and G all right so the end of the song is all going to be split patterns basically so we've got C down up up down up f c down up down down up down down up down all right so that's the only part of the song where we'll see the split pattern otherwise we're just going to keep to stremming pattern one and again I'll break all of this down in my play along which again you can access for free through my patreon page which I'll link below but this is the streamming that I would recommend playing for this song all right guys so again go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really get these strumming rhythms under your belt both of these patterns are super common you'll see them used among a lot of other songs so it's really a good idea to get that under your belt um but once you have the stremming Rhythm and the chords and the Transitions and everything down then we can go ahead and put all of this together to play through the song One 2 ready go it's Christmas time there's no need to be afraid at Christmas time we let it and we finish sh and in a world of PL want to have fun jimy after the rest of this song with me then make sure to check out my patreon page where you can access my free playong tutorial version of this song I go through the entire song with all the chords highlighted and the lyrics and you know the strumming pattern everything is on screen for you so definitely check that out I will link it down below um again this one is free but while you're over there definitely take some time to check out the rest of the things that I offer on my patreon page if you're somebody who is learning to play the guitar it's a really great resource that I would highly recommend obviously because I make them um but anyways thanks so much for watching I hope this video helped you and I hope you have a really merry Christmas and happy holidays to you and yours and uh again thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in my next one bye