Mary in the Manger Walkthrough

Okay, this song is called Mary in the Manger and it is actually from the Christmas album. This is a very original title and yeah, anyway, you can get this online. I don't sell this one in a physical book but you can certainly buy it on PDF and print it at a print shop and get it bound. But I'm going to play Mary in the Manger here and talk through it and kind of give some how-tos and tips on how to play this song right. This one's really fun and it's got some challenging pieces in it for sure. This is combining Away in a Manger and Mary Did You Know, and I thought that was kind of an interesting topic. I actually have recorded this one as well. You can listen to it on Apple Music and added some violin things to it, and I think there's a pretty a pretty nice YouTube video somewhere out there that I published back when I did this in 2021 that's kind of more artistic and has videos of Joseph and Mary and Jesus in the manger. It's really nice. So, look around for that. Enjoy it. But this video really is for pianists or if you just want to listen in because you like music and you like learning about behind-the-scenes stuff, how you play it, what you focus on. This one is going to take some a bit of practice. Okay, the beginning is pretty easy. We just established this kind of intro. Now we're going to jump into, um, the melody but still be playing this kind of feel. So it's going to take a second for you to get it right. So you got to make sure you pull out that melody. And I wrote— I put little, you know, marks on the melody itself. Okay. So the melody is— you get all these other things around it. And again. Now this gets a little bit harder because now you're doing these grace notes on top of it, right? This on— at measure 21, it goes— so you go To hit that right, you want to use your 2 to make that happen and just have that octave ready, right? So instead of trying to go— I bet a lot of people will try to do a jump there. You can do it if you want to practice your jumps, but an octave is super easy. Your body should be able to just do octaves without even thinking about it. So a crossover, which by the way is pretty dang rare. I don't think I've seen many of those in other songs where you actually do a grace note with a crossover to up. So that's pretty cool. And obviously you're quiet playing this part. Nice and calm until here. We're going to get a little bit more volume. It's still, you know, not loud, but you're going to start flowing here. So this is kind of the second secondary interlude you're going to play a few times. And we're going to switch. Now we're not actually into "Mary Did You Know" yet, but obviously you can hear the— right? So we're kind of alluding to it. Hey, this is coming. But then we actually hit this thing that reminds us of the beginning, right? Now on this part, this is kind of fun. This is, you know, we've done kind of an interlude thing and then we kind of introduced "Mary Did You Know?" Let me go back to the beginning. Then we come into this like third interlude type thing that's kind of the intro now into "Mary Did You Know?" So let's play from here. Now to the melody. All right, I actually played that wrong. We want to get that left hand right. The left hand is going to do this pattern like this. Okay, that left hand matters to get that feel just right. So here we go. But you have to really separate your your brains on that one. There's two kind of melodies going on. Okay, so we're going back to that kind of secondary inner loop. We introduced it earlier. Page 2 here, right? Then on page 3, we're going to go up higher and do that same thing. So then this is a hard jump. We're going to go from that, probably using your 1 and 2 on this D and A, to 1 and 5. You can jump however you want, but for me, I like the, the stability of going from a 2 to a 1 here. Kind of anchors me to do that jump, right? Anyway. Then we go into this fun little, like, uh, I don't know, just kind of a new melody that's playing over the chord progression. Okay, we're going to talk through this section really quick. So, so this is kind of, again, bringing it back. Again, you're playing over that, you're playing kind of over some of those chord progressions here, but just a new melody. And these kind of triplets and little runs, or whatever you call these, are not easy. You gotta really practice these. You got to just practice that so your left hand get— your right hand, you're going to need to focus on this right hand. Sorry, it's a B-flat. I'm sorry. Okay, so you got to get that just right. I wrote this and I can't even play it right now. Okay, that's it. You got to practice it just right because I'm focusing on— I'm thinking about it too much. But play through that lots of times. It's actually really fun. Don't forget the B-flat there. It's kind of a— it's an Arabian scale. It's just very fitting for this, right? Okay, so then we keep going. Um, you come out of that So we get right back into the melody. This is not very hard, just a D minor. Okay, so you want to save room. That's going to be your big section in this song where you're going to go, right? So this fun fast section is actually supposed to be quiet. That's part of why it's fun. I'm hitting a lot of these downbeats one half beat before that. I'm gonna pick up kind of half beat before that, and it makes— it creates a really cool feeling. But it also allows you to focus on one thing here. You can allow your left hand to go down and hit that note just right. Um, but make sure this just flows. Nice and loud and immediately quiet. I really love this left hand right here. So when you kiss your little baby, you kiss the Son of God. That's what we're saying right here. So we're reverent about that. Right? Did you know? And I really like that part. That's happening underneath. Then we kind of go into some outro stuff. Now we get to go back and it says, enjoy the simplicity. We're going back to the way the main So we've been through all these crazy notes, like all this, you know, have all this really busy stuff, and now all of a sudden it's so nice to come down and just So we kind of come back to that beginning, and now we're going to be doing a lot more work on your left hand. It's really not hard. It's an easy F major, um, arpeggio going up, and then a B-flat. Then we switch it a little bit. We switch to a D-flat, then E-flat, then right back to F. And actually, we throw the 9 in there with the 2. Feels more like a 2, an F2 there. So anyway, um, that is Mary in the Manger from the Christmas Piano Book, um, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or comments, leave them below and I'll see if I can help you out.