Chords to Let It Be Christmas by Alan Jackson

[Jon Hall]

This is in G maj but there are so many changes I've been unable to unravel them. I watch a video of Alan performing it live and sure enough, other than an occasional G maj, Alan let the band handle it. I appreciate any help or suggestions any of you can offer.

[sblock]

Have you tried Googling the chords on the web? Try this link: https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab...chords_1456508

The guitar chords are usually just fine for other instruments, like the mandolin.

[Jon Hall]

Yhanks for the link. It helped.

[Jess L.]

... I appreciate any help or suggestions any of you can offer.

Well there's this play-along video I made. It's a practice-quality (lo-fi MIDI-only, not actual instruments) "Let It Be Christmas" backing track with chord diagrams for guitar chords, mandolin chords, and ukulele chords. Not showing any actual sheet music due to copyright (and I don't have the sheet music for this song anyway), but this should help you get started:


(or direct link)


References:

• Chord names and lyrics: TraditionalMusic.co.uk . IMO, their chords for this song seem to be more accurate than some of the other chords I've seen online.
• Converting chord names to chord diagrams: Scales-Chords.com
• Timing and basic audio outline of melody etc: Alan Jackson YouTube page (free), alternatively Amazon

By the way, "thanks!" to OP Jon Hall, because I hadn't heard of this song until seeing this thread. Nice song. Not exactly secular and might not work in all environments, but it's still good to have new holiday songs to add to the seasonal repertoire.

Hmm, I see that YouTube (or possibly my web browser's playback) has got the audio/video sync off by a fraction of a second, enough to be slightly discernible. It wasn't like that before I uploaded it to YouTube. They also changed the EQ, which is mildly annoying because I was very careful to set all that "just right". Not much I can do about how YouTube and/or browsers alter videos after upload.

[Jon Hall]

Thanks again JL! This is really good work! It's a fairly complicated song for having just five chords. The rhythm changes from 6/8 to 12/8 are really interesting!

[Jess L.]

Thanks again JL! This is really good work! It's a fairly complicated song for having just five chords. The rhythm changes from 6/8 to 12/8 are really interesting!

Happy to help, it was a fun project! And I actually learned a lot myself while making the video. Namely, I finally learned how to persuade MuseScore into showing appropriately-sized chord diagrams (the video is basically just a screen-grab of MuseScore playback) - I'd been wondering how to do that for a long time but had made no progress with it before. And also in my video editor (Adobe After Effects) I finally had an excuse to try out a thing called "adjustment layers" to do some color-changing on that one set of Christmas lights etc.

About those time-signature changes, I suspect that in the original sheet music (which I have not seen, I deciphered the melody/timing by ear from half-speed analysis of the official audio), it's possible that they might have written those extra 6 notes as a fermata (hold) on a previous note, rather than adding an extra half-measure (the 6/8-time measure that I used). The original song's extra beats fit perfectly into a nice neat little 6/8 measure, so that seemed like the logical way to notate it. I went with 12/8 for the majority of the song because someone told me that's what it was supposed to be, which seems a little unusual, but I suppose it's also possible that the entire song could be notated in 6/8 and that the extra beats would simply be an extra measure without a time-signature change. Or various other combinations. The resulting sound is the same either way.