Silent Night (Simplified) (Piano)

This simplified Silent Night piano sheet music is 23 bars in A major, in 3/4. The melody starts E F♯ E on "Silent night" and the left hand plays one or two notes a bar, A, E or D. The lyrics fit one syllable to a note, and the melody's first two phrases are identical.

Fewer notes means nowhere to hide. The piece is about tone and timing, and there is no hard passage to distract from either.

A major, 3/4, 23 bars. The melody starts E F♯ E. That is the shape you need before you play a note.

Read the key first so you know which black keys are in play. Count the meter out loud. Then look at how many bars you actually have to learn.

Work through this tutorial in the order below. Fifteen minutes a day for a week is enough to get Silent Night under your hands if each chunk is actually learned.

Play it with the notes graded as you go, no account.

The key is A major: three sharps (F♯, C♯, G♯). The notes are A B C♯ D E F♯ G♯. Anything outside that list in the score is an accidental. Mark it.

The time signature is 3/4: 3 beats in every bar, and a quarter note gets one beat. Count that out loud before you play, and keep counting.

The score is 23 measures long. Number them in pencil. Starting at bar 9, when you need to, is the point of the numbers.

Set a tempo you can play the hardest bar at. The easy bars will feel slow. That is correct.

Split Silent Night into chunks of 4 bars and learn one chunk per session. A chunk you can play three times without a mistake is learned. A chunk you can nearly play is not.

Practice the last bar of one chunk and the first bar of the next as a chunk of their own. The joins are where it breaks.

Silent Night sits in A major. These are the chords that key is built from. Knowing them makes a slip easier to recover from, because you can hear where you are.

Play the melody in your right hand and just these chords in your left. The written left hand can wait. Hearing the harmony is the useful part.

Two hands on Silent Night are two problems. Solve them one at a time.

1. Right hand alone, slowly, until the chunk is clean three times.
2. Left hand alone, slowly. Give the left hand that must stay quieter than E F♯ E more time than it feels like it needs.
3. Hands together at half the speed you managed separately. If it falls apart, go back to the weaker hand.
4. Speed up in small steps, only from a tempo where nothing goes wrong.

If a bar still will not lock, play the right hand and tap the left-hand rhythm on the piano lid. The problem is usually the rhythm.

Fifteen minutes a day for a week:

1. Day 1: the key and bars 1-4, the first line of the lyric, hands separately.
2. Day 2: chunk 1 hands together, chunk 2 hands separately.
3. Day 3: join chunks 1 and 2, then learn chunk 3.
4. Day 4: the second half, same routine.
5. Day 5: the joins, and only the joins.
6. Day 6: the whole piece, slowly, once. Mark the two bars that went worst.
7. Day 7: those two bars, then the whole piece at tempo.

Play Silent Night in Chordzy and it will mark which notes and timings were off.

The right hand's notes are long: a dotted quarter and an eighth on "Silent", a quarter on "night", then a half note C♯ held into the next bar. Bars 3 and 4 are bars 1 and 2 again, note for note.

Every note has to be placed on purpose, since nothing else is happening to cover a careless one. Play close to the keys and let each half note fade instead of stopping. Bar 18 is the one leap, up to D and back down through B to G♯.

The left hand is A held for two beats in bars 1 to 4, E in bars 5 and 6, A again in 7 and 8, then D in bars 9 and 10. One note at a time, changing with the chord.

Play the left hand alone first. It is 23 bars of half notes and takes five minutes to learn. Then add the right hand and keep the left at the same volume it had alone. The melody is in front; the left hand is behind it.

Three beats a bar, and the first beat of bars 2, 4, 6 and 8 is a half note that lasts two of them. Count "1 2 3" and hold the half note for "1 2" before the next phrase starts on 3.

The tune was written for singers, who breathe at the end of each two-bar phrase. Breathe there too, in over beat 3, out on the next beat 1. That keeps the tempo from creeping up, which is the one thing that spoils this carol.

Change the pedal once a bar, where the left hand changes note: down on beat 1, up just before the next beat 1. Not on every melody note.

If E and F♯ in bar 1 blur together, the pedal came up too late. Release it earlier. A dry, clean bar is better than a warm, smudged one.

The key signature is three sharps, F♯ C♯ G♯, and the melody uses all of them in the first ten bars: F♯ in bar 1, C♯ in bar 2, G♯ in bar 6. Read the signature once, then read by shape. Bar 1 steps up and back, E F♯ E. Bar 2 drops to C♯. Bars 3 and 4 are the same two bars again, and so are bars 13 to 16 after bars 9 to 12.

Of the 23 bars, only 12 are new material. Playing the sheet music online lets you slow one of those phrases down and repeat it on its own, bars 5 to 8 for instance, where B and G♯ arrive for the first time.

Bar 5, "all is calm", is the high point of the first eight bars: two Bs, the highest notes so far. Grow towards them from bar 3 and come down again through the G♯ in bar 6.

Then play all 23 bars once very softly and once slightly louder. The gap between the two is the amount of control you have, and it is more than an easy piece usually lets you hear.

Ten minutes covers this piece. Bars 1 to 4, right hand alone, until the C♯ fades the way you want. Then bars 1 to 4 with the left hand's A under it. Then bars 5 to 8, where the left hand moves to E. Then the whole 23 bars once through, without stopping for anything.

Chordzy plays straight from the sheet music, in the browser or in the app, and checks each note as you go. Click the sheet music to start; no account is needed.

When it clicks, the three-in-a-bar stops needing to be counted, the left hand sits behind the tune, and you are listening to the C♯ fade instead of watching for the next bar.

Click the sheet music and let Chordzy check the notes while you look after the sound.