Hi again everyone, it’s Jingle Bells Part 2 time. If you are growing tired of Christmas songs, I promise, this is the last one lol!
So in this lesson we tackle the rest of Jingle Bells and I have included the entire arrangment for you all.
Jingle Bells arr. by Ed Sadler
You will notice I subbed a few chords which is a standard thing to do in chord melody. The most interesting subs I used were a D9b5/F#(no root), also called a D9#11, for the F#m chord, and the line cliche style chromatic descending sequence C#mmaj7/E – Cmmaj7/Eb – Bm/D – C#7 for the usual progression Emaj7 – C#m7, both in bar 7 of the arrangement. In the Ted Greene book “Chord Chemistry,” Ted talks about how to sub the dom9b5 chord extensively as well as many other seemingly obscure chords (for rock guitarists). I analyze this as a bVIIdom7 chord as it is much easier to classify chords using this kind of analysis in order to use them in other keys. As for the line cliche idea, I basically just used chromaticism and some parallelism to create tension to offset the boring one note melody of that bar.
If any of this theory stuff is perplexing or interesting to you, remember that I can teach you about these concepts in great detail and show you how to use them to spice up your own arrangements of songs. Just hit the “Book Your Lesson Now” icon at the top right side of the page. I teach people everywhere around the world on Skype and private in person here in North Vancouver.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this and I hope all of you reading this have a fantastic holiday season.
All the best!