El McMeen Teaches Jingle Bells
Well that’s Jingle Bells with all due respect to Chet Atkins. There was a little Chet Atkins influence in that arrangement. The arrangement is an attempt to solve some problems or deal with some problems in the song because the song just goes right into the melody. There's no intro, there’s no way to kind of get your feet wet and get people warmed up. So what I tried to do is take the “dashing through the snow” part of it and make it into kind of off beat beginning to the song and then going to the alternating bass when we hit the jingle bell portion of it.
And I think that the part that is most fun to play is the jingle bell chorus because it has the alternating bass around the A chord and I think that will fall right under the fingers because the bass is going back and forth.
I'm just going from A to D and back to E. And I think we’ll do that in a split screen, I don’t think it will a problem. I think the difficulty is the beginning of the song where you try to get some different texture. And the string to keep an eye on this is the fourth string because sometimes we hit it with the thumb and sometimes we hit with a finger. And there’s a different texture when you hit it with both. Hit it with the little finger. When you hit it with the thumb, it’s a little harder, it will be more solid.
And then the part here is the melody lines on this fourth, the melody notes is on the fourth fret or the fourth string. And I never liked to finger a D chord, it’s just sort of a pain. You need that note. So you're going to make sure that note really ground down into the fret there. Then you have to come off that ring finger to the index finger off to the second fret of the second string into the E chord. So keep an eye out for those things right there. And the ideas really to get some bounce to it and to have fun playing it. So why don’t we catch our breathe and let’s go to split screen.
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