Happy XMas (War is Over) by John Lennon Tutorial/Lesson
Happy XMas (War is Over)
A, Bm, E, D, Em, G
Download Printable Guitar Guide
Unlock with Patreon
Are you new to playing the guitar? Watch my free Beginner Series where I show you all of the basics. You'll be playing your first songs in minutes!
Video transcript
hey everyone my name is ellen and today i'm going to be showing you guys how to play happy christmas wars over on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something you want to learn make sure to subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on another new tutorial and also follow me on instagram for your chance to win a free lesson with me and guys really quickly i wanted to thank journey instruments i'm actually using one of their collapsible travel guitars in this video that folds in half and fits right into a backpack that you can take with you anywhere so if you know someone who would love this for christmas make sure to visit the link in my description to check it out all right guys so this song is gonna be really great if you're a beginner because you don't need a capo to play it in the original song and there's only six chords and one strumming pattern so let's go ahead and just jump right into it all right guys so let's go ahead and take a look at the chords you need to know like i said there are only six for the entire song so we'll start with our a chord which looks like this and sounds like this after that we have our b minor chord which is a bar chord and that looks like this and sounds like this now if bar chords are hard for you or that's something that you're struggling with you can do this alternate version of b minor which looks like this and sounds like this all right that way you don't have to bar that first finger but that's just an option if you don't want to do the regular bard b minor after that we've got our e chord which looks like this and sounds like this then we have d which looks like this and sounds like this next we have our e minor chord which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord you need to know is our g chord which looks like this and sounds like this all right and those are the only chords you need to know to play this song alright so after you have those chords memorized go ahead and take a few moments to practice transitioning between them because this song is very repetitive so it does transition the same throughout the song i do have a tmt right here if you want to get some tips and tricks on how to transition between chords faster but after you have that down let's go ahead and jump into the strumming pattern i want to show you for this song all right so like i always start out with my strumming patterns in my songs if you are struggling with singing and playing guitar at the same time i would go ahead and recommend doing a simple practice pattern that's just going to be one simple down strum on the beat for every chord change so let me go ahead and go through an example of what that would look like we have our a chord down since that's the first chord in the song and you just want to strum down once then you go to your next chord b minor then you have e and then you go back to a and this really simple strumming pattern is really going to help if you are trying to sing and play at the same time so what i want you to do is go ahead and just sing through the song and just do one strum on every chord change so this is christmas two three and what have you done two three another year over two three and a new one just begun two three four all right and you just kind of want to take that through the whole song with that one down strum pattern and you want to focus on what word you are going to be singing with each of those strumming changes all right and once you get that let's go ahead and jump into the actual strumming pattern i do want to show you for the song it's super simple all you want to do is down down up down up like this and we're gonna play that strumming pattern through either two times or four times for every chord depending on what part of the song you're in but if you're curious about that i do have a play through here at the end where i'll go through all of that okay um but again let's go ahead and practice this with our a chord on since that's the first chord in the song all you want to do is go down down up all right and that's the strumming pattern one time through but again like i said you want to repeat this twice or four times so for the a chord we're going to repeat this four times so we've got one two ready go down down up down three times four times all right so you wanna do that for every chord so again we're gonna go from our a to our b minor and do that same down up thing up twice three times four times then we've got our e chord same thing down down up down and twice three times four times all right great and for all of the verses it will be that similar pattern where you're going to repeat it four times however in the choruses you're going to have some chords that are only repeated twice so let's go ahead and go through the chorus so in the chorus we're going to start with our g chord and we're going to play this through four times with the same pattern so we've got down down up down up twice three times four times then we go to a once twice three times four times then to finish off the chorus the rest of these um chords you want to just only repeat twice so we've got our e minor one twice then you go to g one twice then all right so just keep that in mind like watch out whether we're gonna repeat it four times or two times again all of this will be displayed at the end for the playthrough so it'll all be really clear what we're gonna be doing all right so let's go ahead and go through the chorus and uh put some singing with it just so you can hear it okay so we're starting with our g chord very merry christmas twice all right so basically that is the strumming pattern you can apply that for the entire song and sounds really great again all you have to keep in mind is which chord you're going to be playing four times and which chords you're going to be playing twice but again that's all here at the play through at the end so once you have that strumming pattern down let's go ahead and pair that with our chords and everything else we learned in this tutorial to play through the whole song this is happy christmas war is over by john lennon good luck so this is new oh is let's hope it's a good one another year happy christmas to you new oh all right guys thank you so much for joining me for this special holiday edition of my tutorials i hope that you enjoyed playing through this song with me if you did make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well as to subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on another new tutorial big thank you to journey instruments for sending me this beautiful travel guitar that collapses and everything you saw at the beginning make sure if you are interested in these to use my affiliate code in the description box down below i do get a percentage of everything sold there so that does help my channel to grow and allows me to continue making these free tutorials for you guys so that does conclude my tutorial i hope that this helped you i hope you have a very merry christmas or happy holidays wherever you are in the world and i will see you in my next video bye do you