It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas by N/A Tutorial/Lesson
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
D, G, F#, Em, A7, Bm, A, E, B7, E7
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Video transcript
foreign hey everyone my name is ellen and today i'm going to be showing you guys how to play it's beginning to look a lot like christmas on the guitar so stay tuned this is something that you'd like to learn all right guys so let's go ahead and jump into it first of all i do want to just give a little bit of a warning but this is kind of more of a beginner intermediate christmas song just because there are two bar chords that i want to show you in order to play this song um so that is a little bit more of an intermediate skill i do have other tutorials on my channel for easier christmas songs if you want to check that out i will put a playlist right here my christmas songs um but with that being said let's go ahead and go into the overview so to play this song go ahead and make sure that your guitar is in standard tuning and today i am not using a capo just because it suits my voice this is one of those songs it's kind of a christmas classic there's been several renditions and many many artists have covered it so whether or not you want to use a capo is kind of up to you and you know who you're singing it with and things like that so experiment with that to figure out the key but today in this tutorial i am using this i'm doing this without a capo all right and to play this song you will need to know 10 chords and like i said earlier two of them are going to be bar chords so just keep that in mind moving forward and i wanted to show you two simple strumming patterns that you can use to play through the entire song so let's go ahead and jump into those chords all right guys so i've zoomed in a little bit so we can take a closer look at these chords like i said you will need to know 10 to play through the song and we're going to start with our d chord which looks like this and sounds like this after that we've got our g chord which looks like this and sounds like this next we have our first bar chord which is our f sharp major chord and that looks like this and sounds like this next we have our e minor chord which looks like this and sounds like this after that we have our a7 chord which looks like this and sounds like this next we have our other bar chord which is our b minor chord and that looks like this and sounds like this then we have our a chord which looks like this and sounds like this that we have our e chord which looks like this and sounds like this then we have our b7 chord which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord you need to know is our e7 chord which looks like this and sounds like this alright and those are the 10 chords you need to know to play this song all right so after you have those chords memorized go ahead and practice transitioning between them because this song does move rather quickly if you need help with transitioning you can check out this video that i have right here that helps out with you know tips and tricks on how to transition better but with that being said let's go ahead and jump into the strumming patterns that i wanted to show you for this one all right so if you're familiar with any of my other tutorials i do just want to start out with what i call a practice pattern and that's because it's just a simple one down strum on every chord change on the beat and this is going to really help you be able to kind of like get your footing and know where those chord changes are going to be because like i said earlier it does kind of come a little bit quickly so let's go ahead and take a look at this i have my d chord on which is the first chord in the song you're just going to strum down once go to your next chord g back to d alright and what you want to do with this practice pattern is really get used to where you're going to be switching your chords like what word you're singing whenever you're singing so let's go ahead and put some words on screen and i want you to do this with me we're going to just strum down one time and just kind of practice with the words so you kind of just want to take this same pattern and do the rest of the song just so you're familiar with what word you're going to be singing whenever you're changing those chords normally i don't like to use this pattern in my covers however this actually will sound really good if you want to do this with the kind of chorus part of this song a pair of hopalong boots and pistol at shoots is the wish of barney and ben that part is really great with this one downstream pattern so let me just go ahead and show you that really quick i've got my f sharp cord on all right so all i'm doing there is that simple down strum and then after i strum instead of letting it ring i'm just going to kind of mute the strings with the palm of my right picking hand all right so i think it sounds really good there but with that being said let's go ahead and jump into some of the other strumming patterns all right so the first strumming pattern i want to show you you can see is not much harder than just the simple one down strum what we're going to do now is do a down down up okay so that's the whole pattern this is going to be really good for those chords that are transitioning rather quickly throughout the song so i would say this is kind of the main strumming pattern that you'll use throughout this song so let me go ahead and just show you the rhythm we've got down down up all right and that's the whole pattern and you can use this for the majority of the song so let's do that a few times down down down down all right so now we just want to add in some of those chord transitions so now we're going to go from d to g so it's going to look like this all right and then again like i said this is going to be really great for the majority of the song that has some of those quicker transitions but there is another strumming pattern that i wanted to show you so this is going to be strumming pattern two and as you can see all we're doing is kind of adding a little bit of a tail to strumming pattern one so the beginning part is exactly the same we've got down up but this time we're going to add in the last up down up alright so the whole strumming pattern's rhythm is going to sound like this down down up up down all right so try that with me down down up up down down down up up down awesome so as you can see it's not much harder than strumming pattern one we're just kind of adding in some filler at the end there and the places that i like to use this is going to be those chords that you hold a little bit longer than the others this will make a lot more sense when we put it back in context with the song but first let's go ahead and just practice with our d chord on this rhythm so we've got one two ready go all right awesome all right so now is the key to the song what we're gonna do is we're going to use strumming pattern one for those shorter quicker transitions and then we'll hold out the longer chords with strumming pattern two by adding that little tail that we just practiced okay so the verses are a perfect example of where you would do this so let's go ahead and put our d chord on what i want you to do is use strumming pattern one for the first d and then the g and then when we go to the second d we're going to switch to our longer strumming pattern two okay so we've got something like this down so hopefully you can see how we're kind of mixing those strumming patterns together to kind of fill in the song a little bit nice and the most of the song follows this pattern where you're gonna go back and forth between strumming pattern one and strumming pattern two until you get to that kind of bridge like chorus middle section where i like to do these single down strums so with all of that being said hopefully you're kind of hearing the song come together now so let's go ahead and put everything that we've learned today here together and play through the entire song hey everyone it's editing me here unfortunately i had to split the play along portion of this tutorial into its own separate video to avoid the copyright issues associated with doing cover songs on youtube so please make sure to click on the video i have on screen right now to jam along with the playthrough portion of this tutorial and i'll see you over there