Jon Cheney walks through his 2005 arrangement of "The First Noel," recorded for Softly Christmas in 2019. He built it around a recurring intro melody that returns as interlude and outro, keeping dynamics gentle and prioritizing emotional resonance over technical display. He shares tips like using higher registers without volume and ending an octave lower to preserve the peaceful mood.
This one is called "The First Noel." I wrote this song, I wrote this arrangement back in about 2004 or 2005. No, 2005, 2006, probably 2005 and 2006, somewhere in there. And it just stuck with me for a long time. I didn't actually publish it, I didn't record it and publish it until 2019. But it has this really pretty intro. Okay, and that's going to keep playing throughout the whole song. You'll play a verse, you'll play something, you'll come back to this, and it's kind of the interlude melody, intro, outro, all that stuff that helps you kind of shape the arrangement. So I'll play through it and see if I have anything to say about it here. Okay, so we've kind of hit the first, uh, verse basically, and we're going to go back into that interlude. So this song again is, is part of this Softly Christmas album, so it's supposed to be just pretty simple, right? And it has a little bit of embellishment. You could easily play this as a performance and it would be very pretty, very appropriate to just bring the spirit into the room. And people will be impressed with this one. I've had lots and lots of comments about it because it's just pretty, right? Being impressive on the piano if that's what you're trying to do. If you want to be impressive— I personally am not trying to be impressive. What I'm trying to do is move people. When I'm writing music, I want to move people. I want them to feel something, and I like to give them space to do that, right? And so if I'm in their face hitting super loud, hard notes and big, massive passes, sometimes that's fun and it's great. And I've got, you know, I have a White Christmas medley that I just wrote. I have some really fun, big pieces in that. And that's great, and there's the right spot for that. But sometimes you want to just let them feel something, and so that's what this is really made to do. And so I do some of these, some minor passages in here, and then resolving, right? Those going back and forth between those just feels so nice. And then coming back again to this nice melody. Sorry. Now we're going to we're going to play up higher, but we're still not going to get loud, right? So we've played this That might actually be written wrong in there. Anyway, it's supposed to be nice and peaceful and soft. Play that last note an octave down if you want. All right.
