Here Comes Santa Claus Guitar Lesson by Elvis Presley for Beginners!

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. We're going to be doing an Elvis Christmas classic. We'll be doing his version of Here Comes Santa Claus uses all open chords. Great for beginners. Let's get into it.

So this song uses eight open chords, but you could easily eliminate two of them. I'm going to show you how. Right now we have a regular E minor chord. You can play that with your first and second finger or your second and third finger. But we also have an E minor 7.

Chord that shows up every once in a while. But if you're not very comfortable getting in and out of that, you can just play the E minor chord. Alright. The other chord we have is A major and A7. Again, if you're not very comfortable with that A7 chord just yet, you could just play the A major chord. It'll be just fine. All right, Other chords we're going to run into G chord, D chord, and then once we're going to play a D minor chord at the very end and an E major seven chord at the very end. Okay. So this E seven chord that we're gonna be playing, you could play the four fingered version which has much more twang to it. Or if you're a beginner, need an easier version. If you can play E major, just lift up that third finger and you've got an E7 chord with just two fingers. Now if you want to follow along with the notes for my lesson, you can always go to laurenbateman.com and I have all the stuff right over there. Now, before I show you the strumming pattern for this song, I'm just going to play it really quickly so you can see what we're going to be doing. One, two, Ready?

And here comes Santa Claus Here comes Santa Claus Right down Santa Claus lane Sin and Blitzen and all this rain they're pulling on the rain Bells are ringing, Children singing All is merry and bright so hang your stockings and say old praise Cause Santa Claus comes to.

Mind so you can hear this song is very low.

It's Elvis.

And if you're a female singer like me, I'm going to give you a little tip on how you can change this for your voice a little bit down the road. But you can hear it's a peppy song. And the strumming pattern we're going to be using is an eighth note strumming pattern. So it's 1, 2, N3, M4 and 1, 2 and 3 and 4. And we're going to be playing that down, down, up, down, up, down up, but there was a little bit of an extra spice I threw in there. But first, let's start off with the foundation, get the timing down, and then I'll tell you what that spice was. So if we get a little G chord going here, we're going to do 1, 2, and 3 and 4. Just go nice and slow and get that timing. 1, 2, and 3 and four.

Good. Now, obviously, the song is a little bit peppier than that. And the spice I like to add, because it has such pep and fire to it, is I like to do almost like a bass down, which means on the first straight strum, I'm not strumming all the strings. I'm just kind of catching one or two of the top strings of each chord. So it's going to sound like this.

You can see I'm kind of really accenting that second strum as opposed to.

Which will work. We've got.

See, it just gives a little bit more drive to the song. And with Elvis, I feel like you really need that extra little punch. So if you want to try throwing that in there, go right ahead. Now, there's a couple spots where you saw I changed the chords a little bit quicker. You probably heard that. And if you didn't, what we're doing there is we're splitting a measure. So each chord is only going to be two beats. And the strumming pattern we're going to be using is down, down, up, down, down, up, or 1, 2 and 3, 4m. And the two chords are going to be changing. The first time it's going to be E min to A. And the second time it's going to be E minor to A. So on each of those chords, we're going to be doing down, down, up, down, down, up. And I want to show you a cool little transition, a little pivot point for you guys. I love showing these little tricks to you to make things easier. Even if you don't know E minor 7 that well, if you know your D chord, your third finger is already in place. You don't. You know, typically you would play. Play that seven note with your pinky. But here, if your third finger is in place and you can make this stretch and it's comfortable for you, you can play Your E minor 7 like this. And then when you go to play your A chord, you just have to slide this finger back, one string, put your other fingers into place so it'll look like this. So we've got d.

E minor 7a. Okay. And the strumming would be 1, 2 and 3 and 4. And 1, 2 and 3, 4. And 1, 2 and three and four. And. Okay, a little bit faster.

And another little tip while we're talking about chords, for those of you that aren't really great with that a seven. If you're playing a D chord, all you have to do is. Is lift up your third finger and move each of these fingers up, one string each. You've got that A seven. So really easy to move these fingers back and forth to go between that D chord and a 7. D chord and a 7. So that's something you can practice if you've never used that a seven chord before. And if you guys don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman, where I help make the guitar make sense so that you can have more fun playing the songs you know and love. I especially love working with older beginners. Those of you over the age of 50, you are my favorite kind of people. And that's why we love Elvis. Now, there's one last point of the song that I have to go over before we get into the playthrough, and that is the outro. Okay, we change up the chords a little bit here. This is where that E7 chord is going to come in. In that D minor chord we only have. Oh, that was a bad D minor, Lauren. This D minor chord, we only have to play them once. All right? And we're playing everything as a full measure. So it's going to be an E7 chord.

To.

To D for two measures.

Then D minor.

And then you can strum the D and hold it. Or I like to strum it and cut it off real fast because it is one of those peppy songs. So this outro is going to sound like this.

Cause Santa Claus comes tonight.

Now, if you don't want to know the little trick for adjusting songs like this for your voice, if you have a higher voice, you can go right now and fast forward to the play along. But if you want to know that special trick, we're going to talk about that right now. So we're going to use a nifty little tool called a capo. And a capo just is a little clamp that we put on our guitar to change the song for our voice. Now, if you want to know what Elvis is doing, we're starting on a D chord, okay? And Elvis's starting note is this D note.

Here comes Santa Claus Here comes Santa Claus Right down Santa Claus and I.

Can get down there. But it's definitely not in my range, if you wanted to, if you were a female singer, you could play the octave. You could go an octave higher. Here. It's the note where the third finger is playing on the D chord. Okay. So this is the octave. Okay.

So it's here. Here comes Santa Claus Here comes Santa Claus Right down Santa Claus lane.

Now if you have, you know, maybe if you're a mezzo soprano or a soprano, that might work for you. Where I'm at alto, I have a lower voice. That's not gonna work for me. The notes eventually are going to get too high. So what I do is I use this trusty little capo, and I'm probably gonna capo it up around the fifth fret here. And I can still play the D chord without having to change any of the chords. You can hear that D chord got a lot brighter. This is my starting note. Now here.

Here comes Santa Claus Here comes Santa Claus Right down Santa Claus.

Bag that's filled with toys for boys and girls again.

So you can hear how my voice is a lot better suited to my voice. And if you have a really high.

Voice, you could sing this note. Here comes Santa Claus Here comes Santa Claus Right down Santa Claus Lane but.

You can hear that's going to be way too high for me. But someone with a much higher voice, like a soprano, probably could. Could use that note. So there you go. You can use the capo. And even if you're a guy and you have a higher voice, maybe you're more of like a tenor. You can adjust these capo and just play the same chords, and it'll change it around for your voice. But we're back to the playthrough, and.

I'm gonna do it in the Elvis way.

We're gonna do just the open D chord. This song is Pepi, so if you need to use the settings cog to slow things down, please do that. But practice this through as many times as you need. I'm gonna do two verses and the outro just so you guys have a little something to practice with. One, two. Ready? One, two. I want to. Here we go.

Here comes Santa Claus Here come to Santa Claus Right down Santa Claus Lane Mixing and Blitzen. And all is rain. They were pulling on the rains Bells are ringing, Children singing All is merry and bright. So hang your stockings and say a breast. Cause Santa Claus comes tonight. Here comes Santa Claus Here comes Santa and it goes right down Santa Claus Lane he's got a bag that's filled with toys for boys and girls again Hear those slaves jingle jangle oh, what a beautiful sight to jump in bed and cover your head Cuz Santa Claus comes tonight Cuz Santa Claus comes tonight.

Now, if you love Elvis Christmas classics as much as I do, then you're definitely going to want to go check out my blue Christmas lesson right over there, where I'm going to show you how to play the song through step by step. I'll see you over there.