Last Christmas by Taylor Swift Tutorial/Lesson
Last Christmas
D, Bm, Em, A
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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 Last Christmas by Taylor Swift on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you want to learn so this song is going to be really great for beginners because there's only four chords in the whole song and they repeat themselves in the same order for the whole thing so it's very repetitive and easy to get the hang of and um if you want to sing this in the same key that Taylor Swift sings her version in then you're going to want to use your Capo and put it on the third fret if you don't have a capo you can still follow this tutorial and use the same chords and strumming and everything it'll just be a little bit lower than than the original version all right so like I said this song only has four chords in the entire song so let's go ahead and jump into what those look like all right so like I said you only need to know four chords to play this entire song the first one is D which looks like this and sounds like this next we have B minor which is a bar chord and it looks like this and sounds like this if bar chords are too hard for you to play you can take the bar out of this and just put your first finger on the top E string and then your chord looks like this and sounds like this so that's our alternate non-barred version of B minor the next chord you need to know is E minor which looks like this and sounds like this and then our last chord is a which looks like this and sounds like this and those are the only chords you need to know to play the whole song all right now once you have those chords memorized let's go ahead and practice transitioning between them in the correct order because like I said this whole song follows the same chord progression so we're going to go from D to B minor to E minor to a so let's go ahead and practice through that we've got D to B minor to E minor to a so go ahead and pause this video and practice transitioning in that order and once you can transition between those chords relatively quickly we can go ahead and move on to our strumming pattern all right so good news this whole song can be played with just one single strumming pattern and it's pretty simple let me go ahead and show it to you I know it seems really long but once you play through it you'll see how easy it is to kind of get that rhythm going and then the strumming pattern will be no big deal so in Rhythm it sounds like this down down up up down up up down up down down up up down up up down up up down up and that's the Rhythm we're going to follow so let's go ahead and put on our D chord since that's the first chord in the song and let's practice this pattern through we've got down down up up down up up down up up down up down down up up down up up down up it's really fun right it's really simple to get and let's go ahead now and switch between our chords so we've got D down down up up down up up down up up down up switch to your B minor chord in the same pattern down down up up down up up down up switch to E minor down down up up down up up down up up down up and then lastly to a down down up up down up up down up up down up and that's the whole pattern you just got to string it all together now so we've got D B minor B minor and a Last Christmas I gave you my heart but the very next day you get it away this year to save me I'll give it to someone special all right and we are just a tad bit below Tempo so go ahead and practice that and speed it up just a little bit until you can get it at the tempo of the original song now one thing I like to do to change up the strumming pattern a little bit and give the guitar texture a little bit more interest is I will Palm mute this exact same pattern but I'll Palm mute it every time I sing the verses so instead of letting it ring I'm going to take the side of my strumming hand and I'm just going to kind of gently rest them on the strings as I strum downwards you can hear they're just more muted and um it just doesn't ring as much and this will be great for like kind of like pumping Rhythm that it has during the verses so let's go ahead and apply our our Palm mute to this exact pattern we've got D B minor E minor a and the way that I'm doing that is every time I strum down I'm resting my hand on the strings to mute them but then whenever I strum up I'm letting that those strings go so that they ring and that's what gives it that cool layered texture all right okay so now once you have the chords memorized and you can transition between them really quickly and you can play the strumming pattern you have everything you need to know to play through the entire song so let's go ahead and put in all of those elements that we just learned and play through Last Christmas by Taylor Swift good luck baby L but the very next day you gave it away Christmas I gave you my heart but the very next day you gave it away this Fe baby from here we give it to someone special once SP and twice shy I'll keep my distance but you still catch my heart tell me baby do you recognize me well it's been a year it doesn't surprise me Merry Christmas I wrapped it up and S with the not saying I love you I Meed now I know what a fool I've been but if you kiss me now I know you fool me Again Last Christmas I gave you my heart but the very next day you gave it away this year save me from tears I'll get it to someone special Last Christmas I gave you my heart but the very next day you gave it away this year save me from tears I'll give it to someone speci a crowded room and friends with tired I'm hiding from you and your soul of ice my God I thought you were someone to rely on me I guess I was a shoulder to cry a face on a l with the fire in a girl under cover but she tore her aart maybe this year I'll give it to some someone special Last Christmas I gave you my heart but the very next day you gave it away it's here baby from tears I'll give it to someone special Last Christmas I gave you my heart but the very next day you get it away this year sa me from to someone special last Christmas this year won't be anything like anything like last Christmas I give you my heart the very next day you gave it away this here to save me from te I'll give it to someone special all right thank you guys so much for watching my special holiday edition of my tutorials um I've been wanting to do Christmas tutorials for years now but I just never found the time around the holidays but uh this year I had time so I wanted to start off by doing one of my favorite Taylor Swift holiday songs which was last Christmas so I hope that you guys found this tutorial helpful and I hope that you have fun playing this song and um make sure to check out my other playlists if you are still in the mood to play more guitar and also be sure to follow me on any of my social media if you would like to be involved in any of the questionnaires and polls and stuff that I do on those so yeah I love you guys so much I hope you have a very Merry Christmas or happy holidays or whatever it is that you celebrate around this time of year and I will see you in my next video bye here to me from tears I'll give it to someone special