The Twelve Days of Christmas - guitar chords and melody with tabs

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This lesson covers how to play the classic English Christmas Carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas on guitar. We’ll go over the chords and sheet music for the melody including tabs.

Grab your guitar and let’s get started!

How to read the guitar chord charts

To clarify how to read the chord charts in the next section, the top horizontal line represents the high E string and the bottom horizontal line represents the low E string. The vertical lines separate each fret. The numbers in the blue dots tell you which fingers to use on the fretting hand.

For example, on the A Major chord, you use the:

1st finger on the 4th string, 2nd fret
2nd finger on the 3rd string, 2nd fret
3rd finger on the 2nd string, 2nd fret
Circles represent open strings
X means to avoid the string

You can check this link for more on how to read guitar notation symbols.

The Twelve Days of Christmas guitar chords

The basic chords for this song are A Major, E Major, B 7, E sus 4, and D Major. You can click on the chords with links to learn different ways of playing that chord.

Try the following chords one at a time until you feel comfortable switching between them. These chords will be written above the melody in the next section.

The Twelve Days of Christmas guitar chords

Here are some other resources on chords:

The Twelve Days of Christmas guitar tabs and chords

This section shows you the melody of the song with guitar tabs and the chords written above the staff. Keep in mind that the melody and chords are meant to be played as separate parts.

You can refer to this simple guide to understanding music symbols if needed.

By the way, you can get all the PDFs of this song below.

The Twelve Days of Christmas – PDF downloads