The Best White Christmas Medley Ever Walkthrough

Hey everybody, my name is Jon Cheney, pianist and composer and lover of good music and all things Christmas. And coming out with a new song today, and it's called The Best White Christmas Medley Ever. It's available now, the sheet music, 10 pages long. It's awesome. It's a big medley of a bunch of songs from White Christmas, and I go through the songs in kind of chronological order as the movie displays them. I don't do all of them, of course, because this song would be 35 minutes long. It's already long enough as is. And this video today will be for you to just kind of see, you know, I'm going to play through the whole thing, not all in one take. I'm going to play through little sections. I'm going to talk about them. I might stop at individual spots and show you how to do it. But anyway, grab the music if you don't have it yet, and you can follow along with me, and, uh, or just watch and enjoy. Enjoy some of the music, although it will be kind of broken up. It will release on all streaming services early November and probably November 1st, day after Halloween, which is the day that my Christmas decorations usually go up. I know I've got a Christmas tree here and this room gets an exception for the Christmas rule because I start composing music for Christmas usually around August. Now this song I've been working on for a year. I started it about a year ago now and I did perform it live in a concert last year, and those are the only people who've ever heard this song, and I never released it any other way. And so anyway, really exciting. We'll just dive in. I'm going to double-check, make sure recording. I hate to get through a 20-minute video and then find out I wasn't recording. So again, here we go, walkthrough of the best White Christmas medley ever. Okay, so you can see the beginning, it starts with kind of feeling and rubato. You're kind of just letting it go. Jazzy. The whole thing is jazzy. Um, and there's some things that look hard, right? It might look a little intimidating on here, but if you follow my little notes that I have, um, it will help. This pretty easy on the left. Okay, that's the whole first page. This measure right here, um, measure 18, you got some triplets over some like eighth triplets over some eighth notes, and, um, this is a really good exercise. For you to do. I use them a lot. I've played with them a lot for my whole life, and so I naturally do it when I'm playing, but it's really fun. It's— both hands are going to be playing different rhythms, so it's worth practicing and getting right. But basically it's 3 notes, 32 notes. So just slow it down, and then eventually it'll be nice and smooth. Okay, page 1 done. Okay, there's a few things that sound really difficult and are not really that bad. I do a lot of trills and a lot of grace notes and things like that in here. You're also going to need to take a second to get the, you know, some of the accidentals and things that are in there to make it really smooth and easy to play. But a lot of it sounds hard, like when you break it down, it's really not that hard. Right hand No big deal. And then that's all the right hand is doing. And the left hand, really not that difficult. It's just a basic arpeggio, right? Put it together. And then here again, some similar things. D minor arpeggio to a G2. Okay. Okay, so now we're down to the main first kind of rendition of White Christmas. We'll come back to that at the end, and it's very similar. There's just a few tweaks to it. And now we jump into We'll Follow the Old Man, right? So, um, nothing too crazy there. Let you guys work through that. Now notice, this is interesting, this is a swing march, right? You got a march going on down here, right? It's the military, and that's the kind of feel that Irving Berlin was going for. The eighth notes are swung here. For those of you that have not played a lot of jazz before, you might have, but for those of you that haven't, a normal eighth note is— right? Really even. A swing note is going to change everything into triplets. And it's going to be two triplets 2 triplet eighth notes and 1 triplet eighth note is your swing pattern, right? Those are the triplets, right? But you're gonna go 2 of them together and then 1 by itself. Okay, good stuff. So when we go "We'll Call the Old Man," You can see here there's the C and then da da da da. And then if you were to just read it straight, it would sound like this. Okay, that's how you would read it straight. But when it's swung, it's going to be like this. That first— sorry, the first, um, eighth note is going to take two of the triplet counts. And that is a swing. Okay, so here we go. Sorry, bad transition there. That's fine. But right here, the fingering actually matters, and that's what tripped me up a little bit because I was thinking about it, about what I was going to say to you. So sorry. So you You want to be on your thumb here because you're going to go— that's what you want. So if you can see that, hopefully you can. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1. Because you want to be on 1 to be able to jump up to here. Okay? Now we've jumped into just a swing. We've kind of gone away from the swing march. There is still going to be a little bit of this, right? But it's really more just kind of a classic swing now into the song Sisters. Okay. Okay, so this section, this is like— I actually almost made this much, much harder, and you can if you want. You could add a few notes in there. It's kind of hard to do that. I'm doing triplets in there. You can add stuff to it, right? Play with it. Nothing too crazy in there, right? There's some fun, some fun left-hand important things that are just— anyway, enjoy it. So I'm going to pick up right there. That part right there, if you're not familiar with jazz, might trip you up a little bit, but you gotta, you gotta learn how to, how to just feel those offbeats, right? Now I'm someone who adds a lot of notes. When I'm reading other people's music, I read a ton of notes, or I add a ton of notes and just, I don't know, flourish it a little bit. The left hand here was very specifically easier, right? 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, couple half notes, and then it's just chord notes. And what that does is it actually adds kind of a driving to the end, like you set it up and then you drive to the end, right? So next song, Snow. I did that bad. I'm going to play it better. So here you're going to go— it's a little bit tricky because you have to go from here. It's got to be nice and smooth, and it's written just a little bit weird. When you're reading it for the first time, you might trip up, but you'll get it. It's not that hard. Okay, that's a pretty fun section. Make sure that, that left Nice and strong. And then the left, the repeated note is not supposed to be loud. You don't want that. You don't want that. It's supposed to kind of be in the background, right? So And that has a retard right there, slow down, and then it gives you a nice fermata to do your page turn. And now we're into Mandy. By the way, I forgot to mention in Snow, Snow goes back to straight eighths, right? If it was swing, it would be— so we're not doing that here. That's straight, and then Mandy jumps right back into that swing. Okay, so that's the end of Mandy, which is super fun, by the way. I kind of wish I could do 3 pages of it, but I just can't. Mandy is my favorite song in the movie. Like, the performance of it is just so good. So from here, we jump right back into some straight eighths into kind of a weird, difficult run. So I'll play it and then I'll talk about it. All right, so that turns into straight eighths, and what happens here is this right hand just goes— it's just a C scale starting on a G and ending on a B. Very, very easy, right? We want it to G7 because we're going into a C right after that. Actually, I guess it's more of a— more of an A7. Or an A minor 7, sorry. But we're going from this G to resolving to a top C there. But anyway, the left hand is going to start— when it hits that note right there, that A— actually, I think it's there. Yeah. So starting right there, it is now just— it's just thirds all the way up to there. So it's not that hard when you isolate it. It might take you a minute to get it right. But that's that part, okay? And notice that there's a fermata there and another fermata here. So now we're going into Count Your Blessings instead of Sheep. This is back to kind of rubato, and I don't think— yeah, it is not swung, okay? Just rubato, lots of feeling. That— this down here, this is a good skill if you don't have it. That's descending thirds. You use your 1 and 3 and your 2 and 4. You start on the 5 because that's easy, right? And then you got to go all the way down. But you just start jumping to your 2 and 4 and then your 1 and 3. And it's supposed to be kind of patient. You don't have to go crazy on it. Make it pretty. So right there, there's actually what looks like could be a missed tie to tie these G's together, right? But I actually want you to play it twice on the left hand on measure 153. This is back to some our thirds— sorry, not thirds, triplets over eighths, right? But it's adding in some quarter note triplets, which is a little bit different. So pay attention here, and again, listen to me play it, practice it. That might be the easiest way to do it. Okay. So that part is not super easy, right? Nice run up. Now you're getting to what I believe is the point of the song. White Christmas is about the General. It's about what all these people get together to do for one person that meant a lot, that had done a lot for them, right? And so You can use this to really hit an amazing emotional note with your audience if you're patient with it and you deliver it right. So you just come out of this big, beautiful, count your blessings instead of sheep. Now here you're going to slow down even a little bit more. Okay, so this section again, triplets over straight. It's not super easy, um, especially right here. This By the way, I play all this, a lot of it is written to— if you've seen the movie and you've heard how Bing Crosby is singing this, it's basically that. I'm trying to imitate that to the piano. So he said, here he says, "Here comes the General Who." And they all say, "General Who?" Okay, so Bing Crosby sang, they got the general out, and now we're back to "We'll Follow the Old Man" when he's walked into the, into the room. And so this is the big finale here. So you're getting really big. And then right back into the swing march. Try to put as many fermatas as I could at page turns. You may recall that the last time they sing A White Christmas, there at the very end, they play a little faster. So you can do that if you want, or just really enjoy it. It's rubato, it's kind of what you want. There's a couple little differences like that. That's not in the beginning. Okay, so this is where it's gonna get a little different, all right? Okay, so there's some difficult things in there. I'll talk through them really quickly and then we'll finish this video. But, um, okay, so here, rallentando. Rallentando means you're getting longer and bigger and like stretch it out a little bit. Now this might seem difficult And it's really not that difficult. Right hand, okay, just practice that. It's a D minor to a different variation of that D minor to a G7 without the G. G's down here. So super easy. The left hand, D minor to a G7. Really not that hard. Put them together. Okay, then I'm doing an ending here that's going with the minor 6th, minor 7th, which is an ending I love to use a lot. But I stretch it out by just playing an A minor— I'm sorry, an A-flat major. Yeah. And then I go back up with a B-flat 7, actually. Okay, so I'm really doing B-flat. Major, B-flat, yeah, B-flat 7, and then resolving to C, but then back to the point of the song. What do you do with the general, right? All right, and of course you're doing triplets coming down and kind of lining these things up right with Shouldn't take a little practice to get it right. And then from here, I, I considered I'm trying to think what else I could do here to end it. I like that ending. You could add a— that. You could— I don't know. Play around with it. Make it your own. I have no problem with that. Play it my way, play it your way. I don't really care. Anyway, I hope this was helpful. This song is available immediately right now on my website. The audio, the full audio, you know, to be able to stream and listen to will be available November 1st on all your favorite streaming platforms. Thanks, guys.