Christmas Carolling

For several years now I join some Christmas Carollers, the team is invited to a few regular places - some street parties, nursing and retirement homes, and Samson Court in Duncraig. Samson Court draws a bit crowd leading up to Christmas, which is good because our team gets lots of participation, and bad because I end up lugging my guitar and music stand for a kilometre from where I parked. Conversely, we also play in a dementia ward which doesn't get much participation but I have seen some old folks who otherwise have no life in their eyes get a sparkle as familiar Christmas Carols fire off some neurons that are still hanging in there. It's quite heartwarming to see.

Christmas Carols are notoriously hard to play on a guitar! I reckon because all those years ago the hymn writers were writing far more technical music than we do now. Our team has a folder of photocopies of photocopies of often complex song sheets, in different fonts and styles between them, every year I say "I need to standardise these and make some of them simpler to play." This year, it's finally happening. Thanks to my discovery of Chord Pro and a little bit of AI to scan the photocopies/generate Chord Pro files. Then of course I play the songs through to make sure they are correct...and then make some adjustments. Lots of adjustments. AI is good but not that good, it doesn't actually understand anything.

A couple of the songs I simply dropped a lot of the passing chords. In hymns you are often dealing with a three part harmony in the vocals and the chord will follow that. Works on a pipe organ I guess, but us guitarists who just want to strum and sing, yeah, we don't need all that. A few more I wasn't a fan of the arrangement/chord choices. I checked other arrangements on the internet and stole ideas...basically I was spending around an hour on each one. I had about 25 to do...I'm over half way through, it's mid October, I think I will make it.

Remembering that I do kinda need others to check them and agree with my changes, it's not just me using these sheets. Carolling is a group effort!

Here is an example of one I'm working on right now, what I like the most is that every sheet now follows the same layout and pattern, easy to read by someone with bad eyesight at nighttime who only wants one sheet per song - two at most - and doesn't want to be fumbling madly with complicated chord changes when they'd rather be singing/playing - songs they only sing a few times a year with pretty much zero practice between each year.