Lauren Bateman teaches a beginner guitar version of Deck the Halls using open chords like Am, G, Em, and C, with two strumming patterns to choose from. She walks through all three verses and includes a full playthrough at steady tempo.
Questions this video answers
November 13, 2021
A minor (Am), G, E minor (Em), and C
F major 7 (Fmaj7) as an easier alternative
Count: "1, 2 and 3, 4" — pattern: down, down, up, down, down
Down, down, up, up, down, up
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiasts. I've got my ugly Christmas sweater on. And I'm so excited because we're going to be doing Deck the Halls in this lesson and I'm going to show you the most simplified way to play it so that you can start having fun with this Christmas song today. So let's get into the lesson.
Now. If you guys don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman and I help guitar students just like you finally learn to have fun with your guitar. It doesn't have to be crazy, it doesn't have to be music theory and all this mumbo jumbo. I try to break it down for you guys as simply as possible so that we can have fun with songs just like this one. So let's start with the chords and talk about the easy and hard ways to play this. So mostly we have open chords. All right, so the guitar chords for Deck the Hall is going to be A minor, a G chord, an E minor chord and a C chord. And we're going to use those chords for, for the majority of the song. And if you need to use the two fingered versions of some of these chords, go right ahead and do that. The only one that's tricky is the F chord. And I know you guys are gonna be like, Lauren, F is a bar chord that's hard. But it only shows up a couple times in this song. And what we're gonna do, if you don't know a bar chord, just play the F major 7 chord. And the great thing about this song is when you play the C chord, you're gonna go into an F chord. So if you're playing C to get into, it's really simple. You can leave your first finger in place and just move these two fingers, these top two fingers up and down. So it basically goes C to F to C. And it only goes to that F once in each of these verses. So this song, the structure is it's three verses in a row. So that means you're only gonna have to play that F chord three times. Alright, so that's the great part about this. If you use that F major 7, that's gonna simplify it for a lot of you guys. So I'm going to show you two different ways that you can strum this song. We're going to start with the simplest form first. And we're going to start with an open G chord. Okay. And the strumming pattern is going to be 1, 2 and 3, 4. So it'll sound like this. And that's going to be down, down, up, down, down. Ready?
One, two and three, four. Down, down.
Okay, so that's going to be our strumming pattern and we'll use that. There's many chords that are just one measure. So when we start this song, the C chord is a full measure. So you would play that strumming pattern for the entire chord. 1, 2 and 3, 4. Now the second measure of this song is an A minor in a C chord splitting a measure. So it would be A minor.
Gets the down, down, up. And then the C chord gets the down, down. So it would sound like this.
One more time.
So if I played that C into the A minor C, it would sound like this.
So let's talk about the chord progressions for this song. Now remember, chord progressions are just an order in which we play chords. So the first chord progression is going to be a C chord followed by A minor in C splitting a measure. G and C splitting a measure. And G and C splitting a measure. Okay. And on this last measure with the la la la, I like to just do down strums on each word. It makes it easy because it lines up the strumming over the chord. So that last G and C chord.
Would be la la la.
So two strums on G, one strum on C. All right, and then it's going to repeat that chord progression again. And then we have a slightly different chord progression. Okay, so let me just go through those first three. And don't worry, I'm going to do a full playthrough for you guys at the end. But just so you can hear what it sounds like right now.
So we've got deck the house with boughs of holly FA la la la la la la la.
Okay, so that's that first strumming pattern on that first section. Now if you want to try a different strumming pattern, the alternate would be on those full measure chords, the C chord to play down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up. So it would sound like this.
So alternatively, it would sound like this.
So the rest of it's the same. Just for that first chord we're doing down, down, up, up, down, up. Okay. It's the only difference if you want to add a little spice. If not, you just stick with the simple strumming pattern. So the second half of the verses have a little bit of a different structure. We start with D, G, and then C, G, E minor, A minor and then G, D, G on the la la la. Now troll the ancient Utah Carol. We go different again. We've got a C chord, a minor C. This is where that F chord comes in.
We have FA la la la la la la la.
Okay, horrible. Sorry. I'll try not to hit those notes for you guys. I'm gonna sing it, but I apologize for high notes. I have a low voice. Okay, forgive me. So that is going to be the end of the verses. And if you want a PDF for this song, I'll put one on Patreon for my Patreon supporters. You guys can go download one of those over there because this song is in the public domain. Woohoo. So I can give you away a chord chart over there. All right. And then once we get through all that, it's just the reverses repeating over and over again. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a playthrough right now of the song. Hey guitarist, real quick. Hope you're enjoying this video. Please leave a comment below with your favorite Christmas songs. I hearing from you guys. And maybe there's one I haven't done yet on YouTube. I'm working on building my Christmas library catalog. So leave a comment below and let me know your favorite Christmas songs for the holiday season. I'm going to play this song at a pretty steady tempo. So if this play along is a little bit too fast for you guys, you can always use the little settings cog down there to slow it down a little bit. All right, so we're going to start with the C chord and I'm going to use that down, down up up down up pattern on the chords with the full measures. Here we go. Ready?
Deck the house with boughs of wandi La la la la la la la la Tis the season to be jolly FA la la la la la la la la Di nawa gay of.
All the ancient hills I carol La la la la la la la la la See the blazing you before us La la la la la la la la la Strike the harp and join the chorus La la la la la la la la.
La la la.
La la la la la la la la.
La la la la la la Fill the new year lo.
Sing with joyous all together La la la la la la la la la he listen for wind and weather FA la la la la la la la.
So that's how to play deck the halls on the guitar. If you guys are interested in more Christmas songs, go check out my Christmas playlist over there. And I hope to see you guys in another.
