Christmas Carols for Fingerstyle Guitar contains twenty five well-known Christmas songs arranged for fingerstyle guitar in standard tuning.The arrangements are designed for easy sight reading, with the potential to embellish them on the fly to create more complex arrangements in your own style. In addition to the arrangements, the book includes tips and suggestions on adding your own introductions and endings as well as improvising variations. Recordings of all carols are available as a free download. Songs:
Angels We Have Heard on High
Auld Lang Syne
Away in a Manger (Mueller)
Away in a Manger (Cradle Song)
Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella
Coventry Carol
Go Tell It on the Mountain
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Good King Wenceslas
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
Here We Come A-Wassailing
In the Bleak Midwinter
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
Joy to the World
O Christmas Tree
O Come All Ye Faithful
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
O Little Town of Bethlehem
Silent Night
The First Noel
The Holly and the Ivy
Up on the Housetop
We Three Kings
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
What Child is This? From the author's Introduction:
Like other books in this series, the tunes in this book are meant to be easy to play, easy to read, and most of all, easy to extend on the fly. There are two basic approaches to playing fingerstyle arrangements: memorize every note of an intricate piece and play it the same way every time, or start with an outline of the tune, and improvise variations. The first approach has the advantage that the notes are all worked out ahead of time, but takes work to memorize. The music may also get stale over time, since everything is locked in. With the second approach, memorization is easier (or maybe even unnecessary), and you can continually explore new variations, making the music more fun to play, and potentially more fun to listen to.
Christmas tunes are ideally suited for the improvisational approach. Most musicians don't need to perform them all year long, and it's challenging to maintain a repertoire of memorized arrangements that get played only during the holidays. The arrangements in this book are designed to be pulled out at a moment's notice, and allow you to perform seasonal music without preparation. These sketches are similar to those found in "fake books," but designed for solo fingerstyle guitar. Jazz fake books are typically limited to just chord names and perhaps melody. These arrangements provide a bit more than that - basically easy-to-play arrangements with no complicated parts that are designed to be extended on the fly.