Traditional Christmas Carols

Guitar chord arrangments

The chordal arrangements on this page are intended primarily for guitar. They are also appropriate for other "strummable" stringed instruments like ukulele. Many of these arrangements are simpler than the average piano arrangement, primarily because they have fewer chords—nevertheless they sound balanced and complete.

As you'll see, you easily change the key of any of these carols with Key Switch.

Piano arrangements

Complex piano arrangements are truly lovely, but they don't necessarily translate into good guitar material. Often it's impossible to create a smooth guitar performance out of an idea abundant in chords. Even an advanced guitarist may struggle when trying to handle a piano arrangement that changes chords every beat—well, this may not be a stumbling point for jazz style arrangements, but it's definitely problematic if you're in pursuit of folk-style sound.

Chord reduction

Chord reduction is an important, oft overlooked principle when arranging music for guitar, and with carols sometimes it's a requirement, particularly when the goal is to create a simple, folk-style strumming accompaniment. The trick is to identify the important, appropriate chords, and eleminate those less essential, without leaving the song robbed of harmonic content.

Despite the intended chord reductions this collection of arrangements should sound fine on piano.

How to transpose these arrangements to fit your voice or your instrument

You can transpose any of these carols with Key Switch, and you can even transpose chords to Roman numbering.

"O Holy Night" and "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" are sample songs available within Key Switch. To transpose them just run Key Switch, choose the song you want from the Sample Song menu, and click a new key from the key picker. Simple as that!

To transpose a song found online, like the carols on this page, just copy the song, paste it into a "new song" window in Key Switch, set the initial key, then transpose. Read more about using Key Switch.

Saving your transposition while retaining the proper chord/lyric alignment

You can save transpositions that you've created with Key Switch. Just copy the transposed song from Key Switch, paste it into a document on your computer, and save. And make sure the song is still set in a monospaced font.

The importance of monospaced fonts in song sheets

The carols here are displayed with the Courier font, a monospaced font. This is to ensure that the chords and lyrics align properly. If you apply a variable-spaced font (that's waht most fonts are) the chord/lyric alignment will be compromised. So it's important to check your song when ever you've copied it from Key Switch and pasted into a document and make sure it's in a monospaced font. Read more about using monospaced fonts with Key Switch.

It's possible, after copying and pasting from KeySwitch, that your song may display in a variable-spaced font; sometimes this switch can occur "automatically", and you may notice that the chord/lyric alignment is off. The solution is simple. Select the song and choose a monospaced font, like Courier or Monaco—any monospaced font will do. (Always to use a monospaced font with the arrangements on this page... or be prepared to manually re-space the chords whenever you choose a new variable spaced font.)

There are some an exceptions to this general rule. For instance, if you created a song sheet using a variable-spaced font, like Verdana , then after using KeySwitch, and after copying and pasting the song to a document, make sure the font is set to Verdana. With any other font you're likely to find chord/lyric alignment issues.