“Merry Little Christmas” Beginner Version
In this lesson we create a beginner arrangement of the tune “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”. This is a beautiful Christmas ballad to share with your friends and family over the holiday season.
Arranging With Triads & 7th Chords
We create an arrangement just using simple triads and 7th chords, and we are going to play the tune in the key of C Major which is a very accessible key for beginners.
If you are new to jazz piano, Christmas songs are wonderful studies to explore and apply jazz harmony.
Making Our Melodies ‘Sing’
When playing well-known songs such as this one, it’s very important to make our melodies ‘sing’. If we make sure our melody is perfect, we can play very simple harmony underneath and still create a beautiful-sounding performance.
In this lesson we pay special attention to the phrasing of the melody.
Advanced Tutorial In Ab Major
Later in this course you can find an advanced arrangement of this tune in the key of Ab Major. It’s good to learn tunes in multiple keys and this will give you a different outlook, and a different perspective on the same set of the chord changes.
Related Lessons
Intros can be useful to extend the length of your performance and also to establish the tonality or the key in which the tune is being played.
We start the lesson by recapping the basic theory behind sus chords and then explore them in context of major and minor 251s
A seventh chord is a triad which has been extended to include the 7th degree of the scale. This creates a fuller sound than simple 3-note triads.
Practice Tips
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Experiment with the lower registers of the piano in your left hand to add more impact to your arrangements.
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Check out the related lesson on Sus Chords above. Sus chords - or suspended chords - are very common in the jazz Christmas repertoire and so it's important that we understand their use and function in harmony.
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Start with simple turnaround variations as outlined in the lesson and pay special attention to the voice leading of b7ths falling to 3rds.
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Check out the lesson above on "1625 and 36251" turnarounds for more inspiration on chord extensions and alterations that can be used over common turnarounds.
very nice lessons. You are following the trancription and that makes it easy to learn. You show some other stof to do but still you are true to the trancripsion. Wonderful and it makes it more fun for us people the are strugling learning jazz piano
Thanks Jimmy, really glad to hear you enjoyed the lesson!
Cheers,
Hayden
I think the design of this tutorial is far more clever than is at first apparent. My fingers keep deciding to do things. I don’t send any instructions down to them. They just know what to do, how to expand on the material. The arrangement by itself sounds really good (and not in a “for a tutorial” way), but then when I start adding extra little touches, it feels like I’m discovering things on my own, and now it’s *my* song. The best teachers convince the student he’s teaching himself.
That’s wonderful Dan – it’s a nice feeling to add our own touches to the tunes we are working on.
It’s a great sign of development when your fingers start to lead you places and then we are playing more in the ethos of jazz which is spontaneous and improvised music. It sounds like your hard work with learning the theory is now paying off – so congratulations!
Always remember that our arrangements will continually develop and evolve over the weeks, months, and years. One thing I like about the Christmas tunes is that we typically just play them leading up to and during the holiday season, and so each year I come back to the same tunes with lots of new material and techniques that I have learnt over the past 12 months.
You might like to check out this live seminar that I recently hosted. I explain a number of reharmonisation techniques using the tune “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”: https://www.pianogroove.com/live-seminars/how-to-reharmonise-melody/ – the principles that I explain can be applied to any tune they work especially well with the Christmas songs.
I have another live seminar on Friday where we will be exploring similar ideas and principles – https://www.pianogroove.com/live-seminars/251-progressions-jazz-standards/ – hope to see you there!
Cheers,
Hayden
Hayden, I must echo the sentiments of so very many of us who subscribe here, your teaching style is clean and unembellished, which makes it easier for me as a student to focus on the content. Though I joined here last December it’s from Sep that I started practising seriously realizing there’s really no shortcut to learning the instrument so I make it a point to never miss a day of practice. It’s hard but I know I’m getting better albeit ever so slowly. I’m hoping I can play this arrangement (do love it!) passably by Christmas (yes, I’m that slow!) But thank you for this wonderful resource!