Silent Night Guitar Lesson

About this lesson

With our guitar tutorial on Silent Night, you will learn these guitar skills: 3/4 time rhythm, Open chords.

Silent Night in all languages and all Christian parts of the world, no matter whether you call it Stille Nacht, Csendes éj, or any of the other 300 languages it’s been translated to, the melody is the same, so you’ll be able to accompany carolers singing in over 300 languages.

This guitar lesson on Silent Night will teach the song in the key of G. You’ll be learning 2 variations to the song, an accompaniment version, which you can use if you’re providing backing guitar to a singer or a group of carolers, and the full melody version, where you’ll learn to play both the bass and melody lines of Silent Night at the same time. Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds.

So in the first part of the lesson, you’ll learn to play the chords for the accompaniment version, as well as the entire chord progression for Silent Night (in the key of G). You’ll be learning a nice and simple picking pattern suitable for this, and all other ¾ time signature songs.

In the second part of the lesson, you’ll be learning the melody version of the song. It is centered around the chords you learned, with the addition of a couple of notes fretted mostly by your pinky, and sometimes by your index finger. Watch the lesson, and you’ll see what I mean 🙂

If you’re playing along with carolers, or you’re performing this song with any kind of vocal accompaniment, you’ll want to set the tonality of the song to your singer and your audience, before going into the lyrics. This can be easily achieved by playing the last 4 bars of the melody version prior to starting the normal chord progression and vocals, but again, watch the lesson, and I’ll explain this in detail.

Silent Night song details

Written in 1818 in Austria by a priest.

The story behind the song is that the night before Christmas, the church organ broke. The priest could not imagine Christmas without music, so he wrote the carol Stille Nacht, which could be sung by a choir and accompanied by a guitar. The next day, on Christmas day, Silent night was performed for the first time ever by the church choir, accompanied by a guitar.

The song is in ¾ time.

Skills you'll learn