O Holy Night by Misc. Tutorial/Lesson
O Holy Night
C, F, G7, C7, Em, B7, Am, Dm
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Video transcript
hey everyone it's Ellen here and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Oh Holy Night on the guitar I want to shout out my patrons and give them a special thank you for voting on this song as this month's Patron picks so if you want a little bit of voting power in these songs you see me Teach here on my channel make sure to check it out I will link it down below now something to mention about this song is I'm not teaching any particular artist rendition or anything I do feel like this is a classic Christmas song that's been covered by so many different artist so I'm just going to give you the chords that I think sound good um and another thing to mention is I will be teaching this tutorial today without a capo however I would recommend if you do have a capo to experiment with putting your Capo on different Frets to match your vocal range as you'll see towards the end of this video this actually without a capo doesn't match my vocal range but I thought this was the most inclusive way to teach it so um anyways here is a overview of everything I'll be covering in this video today and with that being said let's go ahead and get started all right guys so you are going to need to eight different chords to play through this song and we're going to start with our C major 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 my free beginner Series right here on YouTube so make sure to check that out right here the next chord shape is our F major and this our only bar for this song we also have our G7 then there's our C7 we have the E minor then there's our B7 a minor and then last is our D minor and those are the eight chords you need to know to play through this song all right 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'll make learning the rest of the song so much easier on you and if this is skill you're currently struggling with I would recommend checking out my practice with me Series right here on YouTube where I go through the skill with you in real time together um but once you have these chords under your belt then we can go ahead and talk about the strumming pattern that I would recommend using for this song all right guys so as you can see for strumming we are going to be counting this in a triple it Rhythm so there's going to be three sub beats per beat basically it's going to sound like this we have one and two and three and a four and a one and a two and a three and a four and a down down up down up down up basically what you want to do is just get used to the coordination of the up and down strum so let's go ahead and put our c chord on and let's go ahead and just play through this a few times to get used to it 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 down down up down up down up all right so if you're already struggling with the coordination of you know where you're supposed to be doing downs and up strums I would definitely recommend pausing and just kind of take a few minutes to get used to that on your own first um but once you have that we can pair that with some of these chord transitions so let's go ahead and take a look at that verse we're starting here in our c chord we're going to play through this once so we have down down up down up down down up down up to F here on our F to C we are going to split this in half so f is is 1 uh 2 and a to c 3 a 4 and a all right so throughout this song you'll see there are places where we're going to have to split this measure in half that was an example so let's go ahead and go through that again we've have C for a full measure F split C full measure G7 all right so basically this pattern you can apply for the entire um verse this song is made up of several verses so basically what I'm going to do now is I'm going to play through the first verse with you um but just know that the rest of the song with the other verses are going to be played exactly the same way so here's an example of what this strumming pattern would sound like with the verse 1 and a two and a three and a four and Oh Holy Night the sh it is the night of our dear savior's true the world to the soul found the de World re CH for all oh voice oh now oh Christ night all right so that was an example of the first verse like I said you could repeat that exact same way to play the guitar for the rest of the verses and then a way that I would recommend ending out the song is with this chord progression for the outro so 10 F D Minor G7 c f c G7 and then a single down strum on the C to finish it out all right so so that's an option on how to kind of outro the song If you're going to perform this for any reason but basically that is how I would recommend strumming for this song and you could apply this pattern for the entire song all right guys so go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really get used to the strumming Rhythm once you have it under your muscle memory and you can kind of do it without counting it in your head that's when it'll be so much easier to sing on top of it so definitely pause a video and work on that on your own um but another way that I wanted to show you guys how you could play this is with finger pit in I do think it sounds a little bit more cozy a little more christmy if you use finger picking so let's go over that next all right guys so for this finger picking pattern I do need to talk about two things before we move on the first is how I like to number my strings so I do number my strings with my tutorials with the low E being 6 54321 all the way to the thinnest High E string so I will be referring to these strings as numbers for the rest of this portion of the tutorial and then the other thing to mention is with your left hand you are going to just be continuing to make the same chord shapes that we've been you know playing for this song but with our right hand what I want you to do is we're going to assign each of our fingers to a string so basically with your pointer middle and ring finger I want you to assign those to these bottom three strings the g b and e and for this entire picking pattern these three fingers will never leave these three strings okay your thumb is the only thing that's going to move around and it's going to cover the root note or the base note of each of these chords so for example when we play our c chord the lowest note in the C chord is our a string here or fifth string so that's where our thumb is going to be but if you change to like for example your F chord your lowest string is now your sixth string your E string so your thumb will be moving around 6 five and four based on the chord shape but these three fingers are always going to stay here at the bottom okay now with all of that out of the way um let's go ahead and learn this pattern B basically I think it sounds best with just a regular arpeggiated picking pattern so basically we're going to start here on our c chord you're going to pick your thumb and go down the guitar so we have 5 3 2 1 and then you're going to finish it out by going back up the guitar 2 3 all right so that's the whole pattern for C we have five 3 2 1 2 3 all right and the rhythm is just very straightforward one and uh two and uh three and uh four and uh so we're still counting it with that triplet Rhythm that we did with strumming okay so let's go ahead and just go through over all the chords for our C we go 5 3 2 1 2 3 for our F we have a 6 3 2 1 2 3 for G7 we have 6 3 2 1 2 3 um for our C7 we have 5 3 2 1 2 3 moving on to our E minor chord we have 6 3 2 1 2 3 and I get this question all the time since we're not playing our you know Fifth and fourth strings you could play the E minor without fretting anything on your left hand all right but I would recommend keeping your chord shapes down just in case you accidentally pick you know the wrong string or something it'll still sound good uh moving on we've got our B7 is 5 3 2 1 2 3 a minor is also 5 3 2 1 2 3 and then D Minor this is the only one where your thumb's going to be here on the fourth string 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 all right so if you can kind of get the coordination down for your fingers to pick the right strings based on the chord that you're playing remember the thumb is the most important one it's going to cover the root note um once you can get used to that for all eight of these chord shapes then you can just kind of string them together to play through the song so for example at the beginning of our verse we have C to F to see all right so it will take a little bit of practice especially if finger picking is something brand new to you that does take a lot of coordination and brain power so definitely pause the video and take as much time as you need to really get used to all of these new techniques um but once you get back I wanted to play through the entire verse with you with finger picking just so you can see what that sounds like so like I said with strumming the verses are all played the same so I'm just going to play through one verse for you um and then we can go over the outro again so one of the verses with picking would sound like this Oh Holy Night the stars are brightly shining it is the night of our dear savior's birth long lay the world in sin and ping till he appeared and the Soul felt it worth a thrill of Hope the wey world World rejoices for y brings a new and glorious War Fall on Your Knees oh here the angel voes Oh night divine oh night when Christ was born oh night divine oh night div and then again you would repeat that for all of the verses and then a good way to do the outro would be this chord progression here oh night F D Minor G7 C f c G7 and then a single down strum to end the song on C all right so that would be my suggestion for fingerpicking through this song again apologies for my singing like I said if you do have a capo I would recommend experimenting with the Capo and finding a key that matches your singing voice without a capo on this is simultaneously too high and too low for me to sing but anyways um that is how you could play through this song with finger picking I do think it sounds really beautiful if you wanted to perform it this way um so yeah that is how you would do the finger picking portion all right guys so again go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to really get used to these finger picking patterns each chord it can be a little bit different so it can be a little hard to remember which strings to pick for each of these chords but I promise if you take some time to memorize it and get used to it and develop that muscle memory will become a lot easier and then singing on top of it becomes a lot easier as well all right guys but those are the two different ways I would recommend playing through this song whether you wanted to do the triplet strumming Rhythm or the arpeggiated picking pattern I think both sound really beautiful with this song um so thanks so much for watching thanks again to my patrons for picking this song for me to teach here and if you would like to download a free printable guide with everything I've taught in this tutorial today I do have that available on my patreon page and while you're over there I would suggest you check out all of the other things that I have by becoming a patron you can unlock exclusive perks and other posts so definitely check it out if you're interested and you're having fun learning guitar but either way thanks again so much for learning the song with me and watching and I hope you have a very merry Christmas and happy holidays bye