Chords for How Christmas Music Works

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Hey it's Andrew Huang!
Two high fives today because I'm super pumped.
I want to talk about why [Am] Christmas music sounds so Christmassy.
I'm gonna break things down and avoid any copyright problems by using this brand new
Christmas song that I've [Abm] conveniently just written.
This is not a Christmas song.
I just felt like I should be putting something on the desk while I said that.
So the music you heard at the start of this video is an original piece [F] that I wrote and
produced and it features an amazing guest vocalist.
My friend Dusty.
Let's listen to a little more of it.
_ _ There is a time of year [Gm] _ when snow angels grew [C] up [F] here.
_ Sleigh bells and candy [Gm] canes, _ tinsel on gold and [C] old [Gm] paint.
Through _ [Am]
nightfalls and snow storms, [Bb] it don't matter, you [D] make [F] winter warm. _ _
So this is not a genre I usually write in and I want to share with you how I honed in
on that holiday sound.
First though, I need to tell you why.
Do you remember that time I covered jingle bells using office supplies?
_ [E] _ _ _ _ _
Well the company whose office I was in is called Click.
They do this massive holiday video with all of [Bb] their employees every year.
This year we partnered up again because they had an idea for a music [F] video that would pair
a sort of retro modern holiday [Bb] song with a whole bunch of wild [C] visual effects.
So they came to me to help [Gm] produce this video as well as [Am] this brand new Christmas song and
[Bb] here's how I made it sound super [C] Christmas.
You make winter warm.
A lot of the [Gb] most popular Christmas songs, the ones that have become timeless and that
we put on again year after year, were written in the 40s, 50s, and [Abm] 60s.
I'm talking about songs like Jingle Bell Rock, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree,
White Christmas, Holly Jolly Christmas.
We've all heard these songs a million times.
So the first thing I did to capture that kind of sound was to identify things that make
it different from the music of today.
And there were two broad [Ab] pieces of that, which were the instrumentation and the songwriting.
It's obviously all live instrumentation because this was before the advent of sequencers and
computers in music and there are also certain characteristics of the [Abm] way songs were written
back then that just aren't as popular [F] anymore.
_ _ _ _ [Gm] Oooooooooooooooooooo
Two, five, one.
[F] This is a way to refer to a certain sequence of chords in the Western [Cm] musical tradition.
[Gm] It sounds like this.
_ [C] _ _ [F] _ _ The one is our home chord.
It's the key that we're in, it's where things sound resolved.
Two and five are like a little [E] journey that bring you to that resolution.
These numbers refer to relationships between chords in a key.
You Make Winter Warm is in the key of F, [Gb] which has these notes.
So when we number them from low to high, F is the one, G is the two, and C is the five.
And interestingly, songwriting goes through trends.
If you listen to the charts these days, you'll hardly hear any 2-5-1.
It's just fallen out of fashion.
But back in the day, this was everywhere.
And to show you just how everywhere it was, let's look at the chords to those four Christmas songs I just mentioned.
White [D] Christmas, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Holly Jolly [Ab] Christmas, and Jingle Bell Rock.
[E] E to A to E [F] to A to E to A to [Eb] E to A, and then to D.
It's just really dragging that cadence out.
So I decided to hit this nail right on the head.
Here's the main chord progression [F] to the song I wrote.
_ _ Snowflakes and silver bells, [Gm] _ friends and family [C] wishing well.
There's one other progression in the song, in the bridge, which I really like.
And I'm just kind of retroactively analyzing it and realizing something interesting.
What comes between 2 and 5?
[Gm] I'll hold the [Am] gate at my door, [Bb] but with your hand in [C] mine, you'll make [Am] me feel [Gb] warm.
We've got this climbing, building feeling that's happening as we raise the chord by one degree with each change.
But I can also see [Em] it as a 2-5-1 that's been kind of teased out.
We're still starting on a 2.
I'm throwing a couple obstacles in the way to create more tension on our way up to the 5.
And then we go back to the 1.
And that's why music theory is really cool.
I totally believe myself as I'm saying this.
I'm hoping this is obvious, but it's probably worth mentioning.
There are many chord progressions I could have drawn from.
But here, I'm really just exploiting one thing that was very much of that time and very much not of present day.
Let's talk about music production.
I already mentioned the live instrumentation, which I'll admit, for the sake of speed and also to mix in some modern touches, I did use some computer stuff.
But there are some things you just can't fake.
So I hired some session musicians to build out a horn section.
And there's one more major component that just always makes it Christmas.
_ Bells.
All kinds of bells.
[C] Sleigh bells, tubular bells, bell trees, even a glockenspiel or [F] celesta that basically sound like bells.
I don't know exactly why bells equals Christmas, but I've been piecing together a theory.
I think it's that we associate Christmas with snow.
And snow comes to us in snowflakes.
And snowflakes have this fractal star-like shape to them.
Not unlike an eye twinkle.
And y'all know what sound an eye twinkle makes.
So check out the full music video we made.
It's super fun.
And I hope you enjoyed this little bit of holiday music theory.
I have to go take care of something now, so I will see you in the other video.
_ _ _ There is a time of year [Gm] _ when snow angels flew [C] up [F] here.
_ Sleigh bells in candy