A student and I workshopped an ultra simple version of Silent Night to have a few more fingerstyle elements, and work as a solo piece for a potential Christmas recital.
Our original is from Steve Kaufman's Smokey Mountain Christmas. (This is a great collection. It has 2 versions for each tune, 1 is chords with melody and tabs. The other version is a more complex fingerstyle solo version.)
So the chords in the no frills version give an idea of direction for fingerstyle.
I've transcribed our workshop result on to old people 'large print' staff paper. I'm not using the most official RCM guitar notation style. The idea is to give clues to the student/player about how to get the fingers ready for upcoming moves.
Incorporated here are elements from our lessons: note reading, hammer ons, pull offs, identifying notes within chords, slides, walk downs, walk ups, harmonic.
Note: the harmonic near the end is artificial. This allows you to maintain chord position, since the same one comes up again right after the harmonic. Holding position gives less chance for error. But the student can also just do the slide in the bar previous and omit the harmonic.
Here's the link to an online album that has the original and then workshopped sheet music pages. As well as a short video of the piece played thru.
Wassail and merry Christmas!
