Santa Claus is Coming to Town by N/A Tutorial/Lesson
Santa Claus is Coming to Town
G, C, Em, Am7, D7, G7, A7, D
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Video transcript
foreign my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Santa Claus is coming to town on the guitar so stay tuned if 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 Black Mountain thumb picks now Black Mountain picks isn't a sponsor of this channel for a while now and for good reason I actually love using his thumb picks because they have a Innovative spring design that holds the Pick Part to the part that goes around your thumb this just really holds it a lot more tightly than other thumb picks I've used in the past and I just feel like it's a really good high quality accessory to have on top of that he just launched his new light gauge picks which I actually really prefer because I always strum with thin picks but if you're somebody who likes a heavier gauge he also has a convenient little trial pack which I think is a great stocking stuffer for a guitar player in your life so if you'd like more information on Black Mountain picks make sure to check out the link in the description box down below as well as icard right up here alright so I'm going to go ahead and categorize this as a beginner friendly song but first of all let's talk about our guitar you will need it to be in standard tuning and you do not need a capo to play through this song however because it's been covered by many artists over the years and I couldn't find an actual person who wrote this song you could easily use a capo and put it on different Frets to suit your singing voice so Capo is totally optional but in this video today I won't be using one I have eight chord shapes to show you today and they are all open so really beginner friendly as well as two strumming patterns that you can use to play through the song so with all of that being said let's go ahead and jump into it and we'll start with the chords alright so like I said you need to know eight different chord shapes to play through this song and we're going to start with our G chord 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 so I will link episode 3 right here after that we have our c chord E minor next is a minor seven after that we have D7 next is G7 we also have A7 what score do you need to know is d and those are the eight chord shapes you need to know to play this song alright so if you're new to guitar go ahead and pause the video just take a few minutes to memorize those chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them it'll make learning the rest of the song that much easier but once you've done that we can go ahead and jump into the strumming patterns that I would suggest using for this song all right as always if you are brand new to playing guitar I would suggest a practice pattern first which as you can see is just a single down strum and all you want to do is practice singing through the song and use the single down strum for every single chord change that you see throughout the song Just so you know which words you're going to be singing whenever you're changing those chords so if we go ahead and bring an example of the song up right here I'll show you how this works you basically want to sing through it and do a single down strum for every time you see one of these chord changes Santa Claus is coming to town all right so even just from doing that you can already tell that last line there we've got some chord transitions that are going to be moving a little bit faster so that's why it's so important to be able to transition back and forth between them um so basically you would just go through the whole song and do the single down strum and just make sure you're aware of where those chord transitions are going to be taking place and then once you've done that we can move into the first strumming pattern all right guys so our first main strumming pattern as you can see is just down down up up down up and it's going to sound like this foreign thing to note about this strumming pattern is we are going to be counting it in kind of like a triplet Rhythm so instead of one and two and three and four and you want to count it one and two and a three and a four and a little bit more Dancy like that now keeping that in mind you want to transfer that kind of danciness into your strumming so we're gonna go one and a two and a three and a four and a one two uh a four a one two a a four uh okay so if you transfer that onto your strumming we're gonna go down down up up down up down down up up down up one and a two and a three and a four and a one and a two and a three and a four and a all right so make sure you kind of get that kind of Dancy Rhythm and then once you have it we can go ahead and put some chord transitions in so let's go ahead and put our G chord on speed it up a little bit so you can practice this rhythm with me so I'm going to do it for a few measures and I just want you to jump in whenever you feel comfortable one and a two and a three and a four and go down down up up down up down down up down awesome so once you get that Rhythm internalized all you want to do now is put your chord transitions back in So for most of this song you want to play through this whole pattern one time through for each chord so if we bring the verse back up we're going to go g down up up down up back to G back to C ope so here on this next line is where we get into more of those quicker chord Transitions and that's where I want to introduce to you strumming pattern two so strumming pattern two is going to be very similar to strumming pattern one as you can see it's down down up down down up and it's gonna sound like this foreign so those of you with a keen ear might have heard it the second strumming pattern is just the first half of the first strumming pattern repeated twice so that same kind of bouncy Rhythm one and a two and uh that we practice it's going to apply here as well so we're gonna go down down up down down up all right but one thing I want to mention is I'm going to go ahead and put a vertical line here in the middle and what that's going to represent is where we want to change chords like we said that last line of the verse does move a little quicker so you're gonna have to change chords a little faster so what you want to do is on the left half of this little pattern you're going to do your first chord and on the right half you're going to do your next chord so let's go ahead and bring the verse back up we're starting here on that last line if you have your G chord you would do down down up then you go to your E minor down same thing with the next two chords we have a minor seven down up to D7 dad then when you get to that last G you'd go back to the full first drawing pattern down down up so without stopping that last line sounds like this down down down up up down up repeat it twice all right so basically the whole song can be played with these two strumming patterns the other part we haven't gone over yet is the chorus so let's go ahead and bring that up and for the chorus you can use strumming pattern one to play through the whole thing he's foreign there whenever I do my cover I like to just do a single down strum but that's totally up to you what you would like to do so really quick let's go ahead and just go over the verse and the chorus and how all of this would come together with the chords and the strumming and everything one two ready go foreign and that is how you would play through the whole song so if you want to you can actually go to my patreon page right now and print out a guide for this entire song it has everything that I've taught you here the chords the strumming the lyrics and everything all written out and it's all for free so go ahead and check that out I'll link it in the description box down below as well as in this icard that'll pop up right here so that's free to download and that'll help you kind of just play through it with me so with all of that being said let's go ahead and play through the entire song of Santa Claus is Coming to Town foreign two ready go if you'd like to play through the rest of the song with me make sure to check it out for free on my patreon page unfortunately here on YouTube a lot of stuff gets copyrighted when I play through the whole song but I will make sure to link this right here in the I card as well as in the description box down below again it's all for free you can also download the guide there for free so please make sure to check it out if you want help learning this song but um that actually ends my video for today so thank you so much for watching if it helped you make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well subscribe to my channel that way you never miss out on any other new guitar tutorials another huge thank you goes out to Black Mountain picks for sponsoring this video again if you are interested in these picks for yourself I'll make sure to link it in the description box down below I also want to give a special shout out to my top patrons over on my patreon page I'll make sure to list all of their names on screen right now as well as a thank you that goes out to all of my patrons for supporting my channel and making videos just like it's impossible you guys are awesome here are my social media sites in case you'd like to follow me on any of those that's just where I do fun things like behind the scenes looks at what I'm working on and I'll pull you guys on what you want to learn next and things like that so make sure to check it out but I think that ends the video for today so thank you so much for watching I really hope that it helped and happy holidays