forever faithful logo
Play button
volume icon Fullscreen icon
Santa Baby by Taylor Swift Tutorial/Lesson

Santa Baby

D, G, Em, A, E

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 Santa Baby the Taylor Swift version on the guitar so stay tuned if this is something that you want to learn she so this song is super beginner-friendly because there's only five chords for the entire song mixed with one real strumming pattern I will show you some variations if you wanted to mix it up a little bit but you really only need to know one strumming pattern and they can apply for the whole song so it's really good if you're a beginner you'll also want to put your capo on the third fret if you want to sing it in the same key as Taylor Swift's version otherwise you can always move your capo around or take it off completely and the chords and strumming pattern will still be the same they'll still apply it'll just be a little bit lower or higher than Taylor Swift's version so let's go ahead and jump into what those chords look like all right so let's go ahead and jump into what these chords look like the first chord you need to know is D which looks like this and sounds like this you after that we have G which looks like this and sounds like this next we have E minor which looks like this and sounds like this the next chord is a which looks like this and sounds like this and then the very last chord you need to know for this song is e which looks like this and sounds like this all right and those are all five chords you need to know for the song alright so once you have those chords memorized and you can transition between them pretty easily let's go ahead and move on to our strumming patterns so I'm going to start you off the same way I always start my guitar tutorials which is strumming pattern 1 all we're gonna do is strum one down strum for every chord change and what you want to do is you want to kind of sing along with your guitar at this point that way you know where those chord transitions are gonna be and like what word you'll be singing and things like that so let's go ahead and do an example of strumming pattern one if you put your D chord on that's the first chord in the song we're just gonna strum it down once next is G then II minor than a and that's pretty much like 90% of the song is that chord progression so we have gee a minor so now go ahead and speed that up we've got the tree for me good girl now you can play those chords in that order and you were able to keep up you're pretty much already like 90% of the way there to play through the whole song what I want to go ahead and show you now is the next strumming pattern which we'll call strumming pattern - this is the strumming pattern that you can use pretty much for the entire song I'll go ahead and teach you another one later - that you can use to dress it up a little bit but if you wanted to play the whole song with this strumming pattern you totally could as you can see it's just down down up super simple you want to play this through one time for every chord change so let me go ahead and show you what it sounds like with my D chord on we've got then you switch G g-minor so the whole thing is down down up once for every chord change and that's the whole pattern once you've got that pattern down like I said you can pretty much use that for all of the instrumental parts like the intro and the outro it's also sounds really good for the chorus and the verse is the only place I would change the strumming pattern is in the bridge so let's go ahead and jump into strumming pattern 3 so as you can see strumming pattern 3 is a little bit longer but the rhythm is very similar it's just down down up up down up up down up so what we're gonna do is you want to listen to this in the rhythm so we've got down up up down up up down up up down up down down up up down up up down up up down so we're kind of emphasizing the offbeat's with this strumming pattern so let me go ahead and show you what that sounds like I've got my E chord on because I will be using this during the bridge and this is the first chord in the bridge so we've got down down again that's down so why don't you guys go ahead and put your ecord on and play that through with me a little slower we've got lockdown so go ahead and let's practice speeding that up 1 2 3 4 okay one more time got it so once you get that rhythm down again all you do is put in those chord transitions so let's start on our ecord we've got and then right here you want to switch to your next chord which is a and then play through this pattern again then we've got D and then on this last down up here I like to go back to the E chord all right so let's start from the beginning of the bridge again we've got E down so see there at the end of that phrasing for the D I go back to the E chord down and then you go into G and it's the same thing and then a downtown so this whole bridge portion with this strumming pattern will it make a lot more sense when you put the singing in with it so let me go ahead and show you how that sounds in the bridge I've got my Accord on you all right like I said I only like to use this strumming pattern during the bridges which only happens twice in the song you're more than welcome to use strumming pattern too for the entire song I just like to mix it up a little bit to make the guitar part a little more interest staying all right so once you have your chords memorized and you can play through all of these strumming patterns pretty easily let's go ahead and put that together and we will play through the entire song of Santa Baby the Taylor Swift version on our guitar so let's go ahead and get started good luck you believe in me so hurry sooner thank you guys so much for watching this special holiday edition of my guitar tutorial I really hope you guys enjoyed playing through Santa Baby Taylor Swift's version is very super easy beginner friendly and it's something you can pick up really quick for the holidays so I hope that you enjoyed playing through it with me if you liked this tutorial make sure to give it a like down below as well as subscribe to my channel that way you know every single time I upload a new video also be sure to follow me on my social media accounts if you would like to this is just a place where you can get in touch with me I'm more of a daily personal basis so that's available for you guys if you want again thank you guys so much for watching I really hope this helped you and I'll see you in my next video bye

Something went wrong

An unexpected server error occurred. Please try again. If the problem continues, contact support.

When contacting support, include this page's URL and a short description of what you were doing. This helps us resolve the issue faster.