Christmas Solos Intermediate/Advanced Package

Lessons

• Lesson 1: Jingle Bell Rock - Solo Fingerstyle Arrangement

  Jingle Bell Rock was a novelty hit in 1957 for Bobby Helms. The bouncy tune follows the common form A-A-B-A like many songs from the Tin Pan Alley era songwriters.

  This lesson is mostly a straightforward alternate bass fingerpicking style with a bit of a ragtime feel in swing time. It also touches on syncopating some bass notes, meaning playing them an eighth note early rather than on the beat.

• Lesson 2: Silent Night - Muriel Anderson

  As you probably know, we were fortunate to spend a little time guitarist extraordinaire Muriel Anderson a little while ago and she was gracious enough to record some lessons for TG. She was very excited about her arrangement of Silent Night, where she uses many different kind of harmonics (19 by someone's count!), and she put together a lesson on it. The music is available for purchase at her site- www.MurielAnderson.com, and the lesson is more on harmonic techniques than a note by note breakdown of the tune. This may seem intimidating to many players but anyone could start working on a few of the specific types and apply them to many other situations. We hope you enjoy this Level 9 lesson.

• Lesson 3: Sleigh Ride - Solo Fingerstyle Arrangement

  Sleigh Ride was written in the late 1940s by Leroy Anderson as a light orchestra piece. A couple years later Mitchell Parish added lyrics to it and it became an American Classic.

  This arrangement covers all three main parts of the piece and has a few fairly challenging passages. The last segment includes a slow play through (with one or two unplanned events), which could give the student an idea of what to shoot for before trying to speed it up.

• Lesson 4: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas in DADGAD - Solo Fingerstyle Arrangement

  In this lesson, we’ll learn an arrangement of the classic 1943 song, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, for fingerstyle guitar in DADGAD tuning. I’ve placed the tune in the key of D, which works nicely in DADGAD. We’ll see how to leverage some of DADGAD’s unique strengths, but also see how you can play some more sophisticated jazzy chord voicings in the tuning.

• Lesson 5: Christmas Time Is Here - Solo Fingerstyle Arrangement

  Christmas Time Is Here is a popular Christmas standard that was written by Vince Guaraldi and Lee Mendelson for the 1965 television special “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. 
  This lesson presents a fingerstyle solo guitar arrangement of the song that features the melody and all of the accompanying jazz chords.  It covers beautiful voicings for chords like Eb9#11, Db9#5 and Bm7b5 in a way that should be approachable for players of various levels.

• Lesson 6: I'll Be Home For Christmas - Solo Guitar Arrangement

  I'll Be Home For Christmas has been recorded by hundreds of artists. This solo guitar arrangement is presented in a do-it-yourself style where Neil goes over the melody and chords with different ways of looking at each measure or phrase.