God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Beginner Tab

Holiday Guitar by Dan Crary:

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Beginner Tab

I purchased the CD Holiday Guitar by Dan Crary several years ago and I must say that it is one of my all time favorite Christmas CD’s. There are several reasons for this. One I love flatpicking guitar music, especially well executed music. Two, I really appreciate Dan Crary’s guitar playing style. He is one of the old timers and has incredible technique. Three, I love the song selection and arrangement that Dan selected here.

So I present here a beginner version of the classic Christmas tune God Rest Ye Merry Gentlement Beginner Tab and let you have some fun with it. You will find that even though this is termed a beginner version, there are definitely some passages that would rightly qualify as an intermedate version of the song.

A few notes on execution of this song. Be careful with your up and down strokes of the pick. This is one of the most important things you can work on in this song. Typically a down stroke is played on the down beat and an up pick is played on an up beat. This is kind of difficult to keep straight, but please adhere to the designation of each of these pick strokes. We will cover how to play down and up strokes in more detail in another article. Just keep an eye on the How-To section of our site.

Do you know what a slide is? The short story is you pick the note with your pick and then slide up to the next note without picking it. Again look in our How-To section on how to execute a slide like a professional.

Be sure to download the free PDF and Guitar Pro files at the bottom of this article. There is a rhythm guitar section in the Guitar Pro file which will allow you to play along with the file and try to play the lead notes once you master them. Also, another great feature of Guitar Pro is the Speed Trainer which allows you to set the speed of the song slowly and everytime it loops the song it increses the speed at your preset increment.