Book Description

Christmas Carols in the British Isles presents 20 songs from the Renaissance through early 20th century. It includes familiar compositions such as the “Coventry Carol”, “Away in a Manger”, and the “Wexford Carol”, and incorporates some lovely pieces that may be new to the listener. The melodies for these lyrical pieces appear in their most easily recognized form before any variation is presented. Raymond Gonzalez has a gift for combining traditional harmonies with occasional harmonic and rhythmic twists, providing freshness, color, and new life to familiar tunes. All arrangements are in standard or dropped-D tuning, suitable for both steel and nylon-string guitar performance and should be comfortably accessible to the intermediate guitarist. The reader is referred to the tablature for string, fret, and harmonic locations. The book includes access to online audio of every tune recorded by the author.