Feliz Navidad by Jose Feliciano Tutorial/Lesson
Feliz Navidad
G, A7, D, Bm, Em
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Video transcript
hey everyone my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Feliz Navi by Jose Feliciano 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're only going to need to know five different chord shapes to play through this song and we're going to start with our G chord 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 course right here on YouTube so make sure to check that out the next chord shape is our A7 we also have our D major and our E minor and then the last chord is our B minor however I know I labeled this a beginner friendly tutorial so if you are struggling with bar chords another way you can play this B minor is to do an alternative fingering like this or you could also replace this with your B minor 7 chord so those are some beginner friendly options for you so go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them because it will make learning the rest of the song so much easier and if this is a skill you're currently struggling with I would recommend checking out my practice with me Series where we go through this skill in real time together um but once you have that down we can go ahead and talk about the strumming for this song all right so like I always say if you are brand new to playing guitar or you struggle with singing and playing at the same time the first thing I would suggest you do is bring up the song and play through it with a single down strum on every chord change as you sing through the song and just take a mental note of what word you're singing whenever those chords are changing so here's a quick example of what that would look like okay and so basically you'd want to do that for the entire song and just make sure you know where those chords are going to be changing and this actually something you do right now if you check out my patreon page I do have this entire guide available to download and print out for free so I will make sure to leave that link in the description box below as well as in this ey card right up here but once you have that practice pattern down we can talk about a more full strumming pattern that you can use for this song all right guys so for the strumming pattern for this song as you can see my recommendation is down up down up down up down up with some chucking in there so let's go ahead and zoom in and talk a little bit more about this Rhythm all right guys so we are going to be in an eighth note strumming rhythm today so basically it's going to count like this we have 1 and two and three and four and 1 and 2 and three and four and down up down up down up down up all right so it's super straightforward it's just down and up strums for the entire thing on an eighth note count um so basically what you want to do is you would play this pattern through one time for each chord as you go through the song so let's go ahead and bring up the verses the Feliz Navi part and as you can see here what we're going to do is play each of these chords with the full strumming pattern one time through so for G we have down up down up down up then we have A7 down up down up to D down up down up to B minor all right so you might have noticed some of these arrows have an x on them so what I actually mean by that is we want to Chuck these strums so if you've never heard of that before basically what you want to do is when you come down on on your with your pick on your right hand instead of letting the note ring out you kind of want to use the side of your palm to kind of slide down the strings as you play them to mute them it's almost kind of like a palm mute but you want it to be more of a scratchy sound all right so you want to try not to hear any actual tones coming out of your guitar it sounds painful but it's not painful but you want to kind of scrape your hand against the strings as you strum down okay so if you add that chucking in there and we do this pattern through one time per chord you can actually use this strumming pattern to play through the entire song so let's go ahead and do part of the verses to see what that sounds like and the beautiful thing about this song song is that little section that we just played on the guitar it's going to repeat itself over and over again for the entire song including the choruses so let's go ahead and look at the chorus ex we're going to play exactly the same way on our guitar I want to wish you a Merry Christmas I want to wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart all right and you can see there whenever we end this little phrase on that D chord you just want to do a single down strum and then kind of slap the strings to mute them and that's going to end that phrase and then you just come right back in all right and it just kind of goes like that over and over again until the end of the song All right so again go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really get that strumming Rhythm under your belt and if that chucking technique is something that's new to you it can take a little bit of practice to get used to so just give yourself plenty of time to do that um but once you have that strumming down we can actually apply it to play through the entire song so let's go ahead and go through the play through one two ready go want to play the rest of the song with me then make sure to check out my patreon page where you can unlock the full FastTrack playong tutorial where we go through the whole song in real time together it's all for free so I will make sure to leave that link in the description box below as well as an a pinned comment under this video If you enjoyed learning this song with me then you should definitely check out this video not only does it have a super similar Vibe and feel but it's just as fun and easy to play so I'll see you over there bye a