Jingle Bell Rock by Bobby Helms Tutorial/Lesson
Jingle Bell Rock
D, Dmaj7, D7, Em, A7, G, Ddim7, E7, A, B7, Gm
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Video transcript
foreign it's Ellen here and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play a Jingle Bell Rock by Bobby Helms 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 Enya music I'll actually be featuring their new Nova Go acoustic plus guitar in a sparkling green in this tutorial today so if you like what you see make sure to check out the link in the description box down below as well as in this icard right up here alright so I'm going to categorize this song as a beginner slash intermediate just because there are a few things that you should be aware of but first of all let's talk about our guitar you need it to be in standard tuning and we do not need a capo to play this in the original key I have 11 different chord shapes to show you today which is one of the reasons it might feel a little more intense but trust me most of these chords are super easy we only have one bar chord which is our G minor chord but I will show you a non-bard way to play that chord as well and then I also wanted to teach you two strumming patterns that you can use to play through the whole song 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 11 chord shapes to play through the song and we're going to start with our D 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 beginner Series right here on YouTube in episode three so I'll make sure to link that video right here for those of you who need it the next chord shape is our D major seven we also have D7 then there's E minor A7 G chord we have D diminished seven then there's E7 then we have our a chord next is B7 and then the last chord is our bar chord which is G minor but like I said if bar chords are hard for you something you can do is instead of barring this first finger you can just take your same D major seven chord shape that we learned earlier and just scoot it up one fret so that all of your fingers are on the third fret and then just play the bottom three strings so the G minor chord is not used Super A Lot in this song so you could totally get away with just strumming it this way if that's more comfortable for you all right so even though most of these chord shapes are not that difficult to play it is likely that you maybe have come across one or two that you've never seen before so make sure to pause the video and just take some time to memorize those chord shapes as well as transition back and forth between them the song Moves super quickly at full Tempo so you want to make sure that you can transition between them smoothly to make learning the rest of the song that much easier but once you've done that we can go ahead and talk about the strumming that I would suggest for this song so as I always say if you're new to guitar the first thing I would suggest is starting with a practice pattern which as you can see is just a single down strum on the beat for every chord change and basically what you want to do is sing through the whole song with this single down strum and just get used to knowing what word or what syllable you're singing whenever those chords are changing so for example let's go ahead and bring up first one as an example and all you want to do is sing through the song and do a single Downstream for each of these chords that you see above the words all right so basically you want to do that for the entire song and just get really familiar with how your singing and your guitar parts go together and then once you have that under your belt we can talk about the full strumming pattern alright guys so strumming pattern one as you can see is just down up down down up and it's gonna sound like this foreign before we move any further I do want to just go ahead and put a vertical line in the middle of this strumming pattern and basically all that's going to represent is where we're going to change chords so we're basically breaking the strumming pattern kind of in half and on the left half we're going to have one chord and on the right half is a whole different chord you'll see this recurring theme in this song where we kind of switch those chords really quickly and so this is the strumming pattern that goes with most of the song so again let's just talk about this Rhythm really quick you are going to have a little bit of a triplet like bouncy rhythm with this so instead of one and two and three and four and it's gonna go one and two and a three and a four and a kind of Dancy like that and so you want your strumming to mimic this so when we apply that to our strumming hand it's going to go down down up down up all right so it's very flowy one two three four uh all right so let's go ahead and just practice that for a few measures with our D chord on you have down down up down down foreign all right so once you get that Rhythm down we just want to put those cords back in so we have D D major seven all right and then you'll see this throughout the rest of the song as well if you look at the third line here snowing and blowing up bushels of fun that's the same thing we have E minor eleven again we're just splitting that in half down down up down down up all right so basically anytime in this song when you see those chord transitions moving a little bit more quickly you want to use this first strumming pattern but for the rest of the song where we hold out the chords for full measure you do want to use a different strumming pattern so let's go ahead and talk about strumming pattern too and speaking of strumming this is the perfect time to thank our other sponsor for today's video Black Mountain picks you might have noticed this little buddy on my thumb here this is my Black Mountain thumb pick and the reason I like using these so much is because he has an Innovative spring design that holds the pick to the actual part that clamps around your thumb so that just lends itself to a much tighter grip than you'll find with other thumb picks that are out there so I've always liked these thumb picks because I sweat a lot under all these studio lights and things like that and it's always stayed on my thumb no problem and actually this is his newest model he just released his light gauge line so if you are somebody like me who likes to use thin picks this is the perfect one for you of course he also offers a convenient variety pack with all different gauges of picks so if you have a guitar player in your life and you're looking for the perfect Christmas gift stocking stuffer definitely check out the Black Mountain picks I will link them in the description box down below as well as in this I card right up here alright so moving right into the second strumming pattern as you can see it's down down up down up and the whole thing is going to sound like this so your ears might have picked it up but the first half of the strumming pattern is exactly the same Rhythm as our first strumming pattern but we're just kind of ending it with a different extension so we have down down up up down up you still want to have that kind of bouncy like um Dancy kind of feel to the Rhythm so we have one and a two and a three and a four and a one and a two and a three and a four and a one two a four a one two a a four a down down up up down up all right so let's go ahead and practice that with one of our chords let's just do our D chord one two ready go down down up up down down down up up down up foreign so basically you want to use this strumming pattern for any of those cords that you're going to hold on to a little bit longer so for example if we bring that verse back up we talked about how our D to D major 7 is a quick transition so we're using strumming pattern one down down up down down up but then on this last D you're going to hold it out for full measure so that's when you would switch to the second strumming pattern down down up up down all right so that first line we're going to be using both strumming patterns all right and most of the rest of this song follows that same formula so if we continue going so that whole line is strumming pattern one the next one is as well E minor A7 E minor a CE then on this last line you're going to go to strumming pattern two and do the full pattern down down up down up up down up down down up up down up all right so for the whole verse it'll sound like this strumming pattern one switch to two you got it Jingle Bells another Jingle Home all right awesome so most of the song follows that exact same pattern as you know this song is pretty repetitive so the only other part we have to talk about is the pre-chorus and chorus so let's go ahead and bring up an example of that on screen and again you're using the same strumming patterns to play through these as well so we have our G chord we're going to start on our second strumming pattern up D diminished seven down down up up down up to D repeat back twice E7 I a I like to just do a single down strum on that a but you could also continue strumming pattern two as well so without stopping it sounds like this about time gliding in a one-horse sleigh all right so that's kind of how that whole song goes the rest of it like I said is very repetitive so we've gone over how the whole song structure goes so now let's go ahead and put everything we've learned together in this tutorial to play through the songs ready go jingle bell jingle bell jingle bell Jingle Bells if you want to play through the rest of the song with me then make sure to check out my full play along tutorial for free on my patreon page I'll make sure to link it in the description box down below as well as in this I card right up here unfortunately on YouTube I run into a lot of copyright issues with playing through the whole song and things like that but this whole thing is free on my patreon page as well as a free printable guide that has everything I taught in this tutorial in it including the cords the strumming and the lyrics and everything so that's also for free that you can print out so I'll make sure to link both of those things in the description box down below so make sure to check that out but that does end the video today so thank you so much for watching if this helped you make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well as subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new tutorials another thank you goes out to Enya music and Black Mountain picks for sponsoring today's video and I also wanted to do a special shout out to my top patrons over on my patreon page I'll make sure to have all of their names listed on screen right now and of course I think you goes out to all my patrons for supporting my channel and making videos just like this impossible you guys are awesome here are my social media sites in case you'd like to follow me in any of those that's just where I do fun things like behind the scenes looks at things 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 that ends the video today so thank you so much for watching I hope that it helped and happy holidays bye hello