Learn These 4 Christmas Riffs on Guitar

Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree

We'll start off with the 1958 Brenda Lee hit Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree, which you may know from the film Home Alone! We're covering the intro for this one. For the tone we went with a strat on the neck pickup into a clean amp with a bit of short delay.

As for the notes - we're in the key of Ab and using a really nice harmonised major scale run down to get into the song. There are slides up and down between the positions so make sure you know where you're sliding to, and if the interval is a major 3rd or a minor 3rd. Here are the notes on the fretboard for you:

We've got a bit of a swung rhythm here too so try to keep that going as you play through the notes! If you're not sure what that means it's basically

Step Into Christmas

The next song on our list is an Elton John classic and we're switching over to the acoustic! You know Christmas is around the corner when you start hearing this in every supermarket! This riff can be broken down into three sections. We recommend learning them individually at first then putting them together.

Section 1

Before we go into the individual notes we should be aware of the key. For this song it's D Major, and the chords are D and A. But… the first note we play is actually the minor 3rd of D, so it's not in key! This gives us a bit of a bluesy sounding riff, as the rest of the notes are definitely in key. Here are the notes in that first run:

Section 2

Then we're onto a D major chord which we slightly modify as part of this riff. We start with the usual open D chord shape but then quickly remove the fretted notes on the G and E string, leaving just the 3rd fret on the B string. Then we play the usual D shape again. Here are those chord shapes for you to try:

Section 3

Finally we've got a nice chromatic run up to lead us back into the first section. These notes are played on the offbeat, so bear that in mind when you're trying to get the rhythm! Here are the notes:

Merry Xmas Everybody

Now we're onto yet another Christmas Banger, this time by Slade. This song uses a blues riff idea but with a really cool twist. We've covered the keys intro and the main verse chords here. Let's look at them one by one:

Intro

This mostly based around a Bb5 chord with a descending bassline. So, we follow this progression:

| Bb5 - Bb5/A | Bb5/G - Bb5/F | D - Dsus4 | D |

The slash chords simply mean play the left side as the chord, and the right side is the lowest note you hear. After the Bb5/F we can play an open D to Dsus4 chord before the bluesy style riff. Here are the powerchord shapes for you:

The riff

From there we're into the main verse riff which uses a pretty standard idea but changes it around a bit to give us something quite unique. The whole thing is based around a power chord progression which goes

| G5 - E5 | B5 | D5 | D5 |

We're playing this whole progression with a swung down up strumming pattern, and each chord has its own extra embellishment for the riff. The embellishment changes for each chord, but the rhythm doesn't. We'll start by looking at the extra note on the G5 part of the riff; Our extra note is on the 7th fret of the A string. It's important to hold the 'normal' chord down while you're playing it as we need to pull off from that note back to the normal chord. Once you have that idea over the G5 you can move on to the other chords. Here they all are with the extra notes shown:

Fairytale Of New York

The last song on our list is a fun acoustic arrangement of the intro. It's fairly challenging, but if you take each chord once by one you'll soon get the hang of it! The progression is:

| Gadd9 - Dmaj7 | A5 - G5 | A5 - D |

Within that progression there are some changes we make to the individual chords to play the melody notes. Here is each chord with the melody notes shown:

Practice the chords with the small changes and then gradually put the progression together.