You can learn to play the popular Christmas song Silent Night on your guitar even if you don’t know sheet music. You’ll use guitar tabs to show you where to put your fingers!
What is guitar tablature?
It’s a way of showing you how to play a melody on your guitar without using sheet music notation. Instead, he will use digits that indicate the strings to play and the frets to use. Ordinary guitar tab notation uses a staff with six lines representing the six strings.
In this guitar lesson you will only use digits. I found that the staff notation can get distorted on article sites, so the following notation is safer. You will find ordinary guitar tablature notation on my bonnetastomusic site.
As mentioned, the Silent Night Christmas carol is a popular song and you will find Christmas sheet music for this song and other Christmas carols on the internet. It’s harder to find a simple guitar tab for these types of songs. First we’ll take a look at the modern English lyrics of the first verse.
silent night holy night
Everything is calm everything is bright
Around the Virgin Mother and Child
Holy infant so tender and soft
Now you will learn the melody on your guitar one line at a time with the help of guitar tablature. Let us begin:
silent night holy night
0/3 2/3 0/3 2/4 0/3 2/3 0/3 2/4
0/3 means you play the 3rd string without pressing a fret. 2/3 tells you to press the second fret of the third string. In other words, the digit before the slash tells you which fret to press, and the one to the right of the slash tells you which string to play.
Let’s continue with your guitar tablature melody:
Everything is calm everything is bright
3/2 3/2 0/2 1/2 1/2 0/3
What fingers of the left hand should you use?
You can of course use your index finger to play all the notes. However, I recommend that you play the melody in a way that prepares your fingers for more difficult pieces of music in the near future.
This fingering means that you play all the notes on the 1st fret with your index finger, the notes on the 2nd fret with your middle finger, and the notes on the 3rd fret with your ring finger.
The advantage is that you can keep your hand in the same position while playing, it will be easier to orient yourself, and when you get used to this fingering you will also be able to play melodies faster if necessary.
The downside is that it initially feels awkward to play this way. Often your ring finger may have a hard time obeying your commands. My advice is to hang in there and your fingers will get used to their new tasks on the guitar fretboard.
Here are the following guitar tablature notes:
Around the Virgin Mother and Child
2/3 2/3 1/2 0/2 2/3 0/3 2/3 0/3 2/4
The next line of the lyrics will have an identical row of guitar tab notes:
Holy infant so tender and soft
2/3 2/3 1/2 0/2 2/3 0/3 2/3 0/3 2/4
By the way, you can use the thumb of your right hand to pick the notes! Here is the following line:
sleep in heavenly peace
3/2 3/2 1/1 3/2 0/2 1/2 0/1
And here is the final guitar tablature:
sleep in heavenly peace
1/2 0/3 2/4 0/3 3/4 0/4 3/5
I recommend that you learn this melody by heart, one line at a time. The tab notation is just a means to help you find the notes. Learning melodies by heart will give you a growing repertoire of songs to play when you see a guitar spinning.