How To Play “Joy To The World” In An Easy & Playful Way

Here is a transcription of the video if you would like to follow along:

Let’s take a look at one of the Christmas carols today that we can learn to play very easily – How To Play “Joy To The World” In An Easy & Playful Way – because it’s made out of nothing but a diatonic scale. A diatonic scale is those boring scales you used to practice as a kid that just run from one note up eight notes, an octave. Octavo, octopus, eight. And all the melody is contained in that octave, and no sharps or flats, no accidentals are used at all.

In other words, if I play it in the key of C, it would just be like this. And if I played it clear through this song, you’d see it’s within the confines of that one octave. Nothing higher, nothing lower, so it’s very easy to learn, right?

And the chords are very simple. You only use three chords: the C chord, the F chord, and the G chord. And you can use them in your right hand as well as in your left hand, of course, so in the left hand, I’m gonna make it kind of a bass that goes like that part of the time. And I’m just playing the C note repeatedly. In terms of counting, it’d be, “One and two and three and four and, one and two and three and four and, one… ”

See that? Okay, now let’s take it a little slower here. I established that left-hand bass here, and on the right hand, I kinda have a frozen hand kinda deal going. I’m playing the C chord, but C’s on top, G’s in the middle, and the E’s on the bottom. And I’m just gonna leave my hand frozen. By frozen, I mean it’s in that position. If I put glue on my fingers and just played each note going down all the white keys. That’s all there is to it. Okay? so you don’t even have to know what chord you’re playing at that point. Okay? It’s good to know, but I mean, you wouldn’t have to just to play the melody there.

Okay? So let’s take it that far.

Now you’d probably say, “Well, that’s kind dissonant,” but listen.

You speed it up, and it loses that dissonant sound. If you don’t like that sound, then play the actual chord. Play C, G, F, C, F, C, G, C. Okay? ‘Cause it’s only those three chords: C, F, and G. C, G upside down second inversion, F upside down, root position of C, first inversion of F, second inversion of C, root position of G, if you want to put the seventh in that’s fine, and then the first inversion of C. So that would sound like this.

Okay, now, when we get down to the bottom here, let’s put a little “amen” on it. See that? I just pulled my bottom two fingers up one and then back down.

Okay, let’s do it that far.

Opes! I’m sorry, I did a walk-down instead of an amen. I was gonna teach you the amen.
So you can do that. Take the C chord, move it to the F, and then back to C. Or you could do a walkdown. I did an amen walkdown. In other words, I started on the four chord and went down to the one chord by parallel tenths. Those notes are ten notes apart: F and A, E and G, D and F, and C and E.

Okay, that far.

Now. F chord. And after I play the F chord, I’m gonna do an amen. Amen. How do you do an amen on the F chord? Same way. You take the four chord of F, which is 1, 2, 3, 4 notes above F, which is B flat. How do I know it’s B flat? Because in the F scale there’s a B flat. Okay? So I play the B flat chord, and then the F chord, okay?

Now I think here we’ll do an amen too. Whoops. That wouldn’t work. Let me do it this way.
Yeah, that would probably- you can go from F to G. Or we could go from C to G. Either one.
And there you could pull your bottom fingers up in thirds and back down. Okay?
Then the middle part’s easy. If you want to go up an octave, do the same thing.
Okay, that was kinda sloppy, but you get the idea. You come down the same way in the middle bar.

You can echo that, or you could run it if you want to.

I’m making F minor there.

Now the nice thing about, since the song is built on a diatonic scale, you could play it on any key. All you have to know is the scale of that key. For example, if you knew the scale of D flat, then you could just move from the C chord to the A flat seventh chord, which is the five seventh chord in the key of D flat, and play it in the key of D flat.

And do the same thing there with key of D.

By the way, it’s written in the key of D. George Frederick Handel wrote it in the key of D, but you can play it any key. So, we want to go to E flat.

Now, I don’t want to imply that that’s the only style that you can play “Joy to the World” in. That’s just one, kinda fun style. You could obviously play it any way you wanted. Here’s a simple way.

That’s kind of a New Age-y kinda deal, or a music box kinda thing. Or you could play it in chimes, like this.

Now, a good thing to do there is to lay down some bells first, like this.

Like so. Or you can play it- you know, there’s lots of ways you can play it.

Anyway, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our free newsletter. And we also have a course, of course, in Christmas carols, that covers this and lots of others, so if you want to get up to speed on that, you’ll probably want to look into that. So, thanks for being with me, and we’ll see you next time around. Bye bye for now.

Here is the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqqBHN1Vhz8

For a complete course on playing Spectacularly Beautiful Christmas Carols on your piano for your family and friends this Christmas, click here to read all about it: https://www.playpiano.com/musical-courses/christmas-carols.htm

*****************************************************************************************