I did a bit of searching for Christmas songs with chords on
the Internet. Most of the “hits” were
for sites where you can purchase music, but there were a few sites where you
can print out an individual’s interpretation of the guitar chords. I have listed a few that I discovered below,
with notes about the quantity and quality of songs, ease of use, and whether they clog your screen with ads or bomb you with pop-ups. Hyperlinks are given to the main page and also the Christmas song
index, if any.
Most say for personal use only.
Some are plain text, others dressed up.
Some put the chords above the lyrics, others on the side.
All are subject to misspellings.
Some have multiple versions of the same song (submitted by
different visitors), so their song totals may be inflated. Of course, if the site focuses on music
types you don’t want, the total is not of value anyway.
Try a few different ones as people may have recorded in
different keys. My brief excursion into
the Web was not enough to get an idea of whether some sites filter out
transcriptions with chords unknown to beginners.
The Guitar Guy
http://www.theguitarguy.com
A single collection of lyrics and chords. Songs are mostly from the 1930s to 1970s,
which pick up many of the “modern” Christmas songs. A few unusual ones are marked by numbers. Chords above the lyrics.
His home page says
The songs in this collection are
songs that I (as a fan) consider classics -- most of them are, indeed, old
classics. They are also songs that are rarely found elsewhere on the internet,
which is why I transcribed them in the first place. And as of June 2003, to no
one's surprise more than my own, there are now 900 of them here.
There are no ads of any kind on his site, which I
appreciate. He says you can suggest
songs you want posted and he may add them.
He also has a chord chart at
http://www.theguitarguy.com/chord.htm
On-Line Guitar Archive (OLGA)
http://www.olga.net
Boasts over 28000 files as of December 2003. The songs are either tab (*.btab) or chord
(*.crd) files that you have to download individually, which makes browsing
slower.
Plain text, many don’t have all the words, just the first
words in the line. These are sent in by
different contributors, which may have chords above the lyrics or at the end of
the line, as well as other comments by the submitter. There are guides to reading tab format:
http://www.olga.net/faq/tabbing.php
and a chord generator at
http://www.olga.net/programs/web/chordgen/guitar.php
In the above search for “Silent Night”, there is no obvious
way to choose (turns out the 2nd was chords above, the third was chords to the
right, the fourth was a tab file).
Harmony Central
http://www.harmony-central.com/
Commercial site with reviews and sales of musical
instruments.
There are many links for free guitar music (some
non-functional) listed on the page
http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/tab.html
Link to On-Line Guitar Archive (OLGA). The OLGA page says “Please
note that you are NOT supporting OLGA if you use Harmony Central. They
merely link to the files at olga.net”
Sometimes you get server messages
about not being able to access the pages.
However, there is a Christmas song index not in the OLGA site
itself. It also tells you whether it is
a chord or tab file.
http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/OLGA/all/misc_christmas.html
Christian Music Web
http://www.christianmusicweb.com/song_archives.html
Some color ads here.
Mostly text files with chords above lyrics; some attribute the
submitter. Not a good index, but you
can search by title at
http://www.christianmusicweb.com/songs/All_Songs_Here/
or by performer at
http://www.christianmusicweb.com/songs/
About.com
About.com is a commercial portal that happens to have a guitar page
http://guitar.about.com/
and a Christmas song index at
http://guitar.about.com/library/blchristmassongmenu.htm
For each song you get a page asking whether you want to see lyrics or chords, so there is more clicking, and some pop-up ads. The songs I saw had chords over lyrics and some had a chord listing at the bottom.
Chordie
http://chordie.com/
There is a Christmas song (mostly secular) index at
http://chordie.com/song.php/songartist/Holiday
Ads are in the frame.
You get prompted for formatted or unformatted. A few tries at formatted did not result in anything.
Text format, ones I saw had chords listed to the right of
the lines. Seem to be linked to
different locations where the info was stored; lots of clicks to get in and
out, but not the server problems like OLGA.
Has ads, chord generator below
http://www.tabheaven.com/chordgenerator.php
Started getting pop-ups after opening this. Would use one of the other ones.