Learn to play guitar with weekly video lessons & print-friendly guides! Learn your favorite songs & techniques with step-by-step tutorials that actually explain how to get from here to there.
🎸 Christmas Magic with the Pogues – "Fairytale of New York"
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LESSON #610 ​Click to watch free video lesson​ My friends! In today’s new lesson I’m excited to teach you how to play Fairytale of New York, the classic Christmas duet by The Pogues, featuring Kirsty MacColl. This isn’t a song I grew up listening to here in the USA, and indeed only learned of it in the past few years via several Song Notes members. In that time it’s become one of my all-time favorites… and in this lesson I’ll teach you everything needed to play it on guitar. This one uses just four chords (D G A Bm), but rhythmically it’s incredibly tricky. This is due to multiple time signature changes, including two sections in 12/8 time that are quite different from the standard fare in 4/4 time. The Pogues singer Shane MacGowan equated this song to Bohemian Rhapsody, regarding its rather epic structure. Here's a visualization I made to help you see it from a bird's eye view: In my lesson, I walk you through all this — with examples of simple and intermediate strumming patterns you can use along the way. Don’t miss my play-along video, where I perform the entire song measure-for-measure to match The Pogues. Merry Christmas my friends, and enjoy!
👉 Get the lyric sheet – it'll walk you through many chord changes in the song, including the instrumental sections throughout. 👉 Get my strumming & rhythm notes – along with several other resources for this song, over on my lesson webpage. Thanks to the many of you who requested this one over the years! It's truly become a favorite of mine, and I even got my daughter singing along all week long as I've been working on this lesson. I'm off to properly begin my winter break with the kids, who just wrapped midterms today... here's wishing all of you a Happy Christmas in the week to come! David Browse all my lessons at songnotes.net​
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Song Notes by David Pots
Learn to play guitar with weekly video lessons & print-friendly guides! Learn your favorite songs & techniques with step-by-step tutorials that actually explain how to get from here to there.
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