Things are always busy for me this time of year with the holidays and the fact that two of my three children have birthdays in December. However, due to many requests, I’ve managed to throw together a transcription of my arrangement of the Vince Guaraldi classic, “Christmas Time is Here” from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” I’ve also got a MIDI file for those of you that like Synthesia or other MIDI-based tools for learning new music. The MIDI file is auto-generated from my notation software, so it’s not a particularly “musical” performance!

Christmas Time is Here (Sheet Music as PDF)

Christmas Time is Here (MIDI File)

You may wish to right-click and choose “Save As…” to download these to your computer.

If you haven’t heard the tune, click the thumbnail below for my old 2008 recording of it on my old YouTube channel. Happy Holidays to you all!

Its still a work in progress, but if you have an iPod, iPhone, iPad, or iSomethingElse, you should be able to subscribe to my videos using iTunes, and put them on your mobile device. This might make practicing at the old piano a bit easier!

I haven’t actually tested this (I don’t have one of these iNfamous iDevices), so give it a try and let me know if it works!

Just click the new link over on the right side… the one that says Videos in iTunes.

After finally wrapping up the videos for Piano Funk Groove #4, I decided to have a little fun and put together an alternate version of the tune along with a video. I even broke out my 1985 Roland AXIS Keytar, and it’s pal the Akai MX-73 (also from 1985). I had a lot of fun shooting this against my homemade greenscreen and editing the video. I used open source software for nearly everything:

• Avisynth: For green screen keying, deinterlacing and colorizing video
• Blender: (Sequence Editor) for actually editing the video timeline and layout out the multi-frame cuts
• Gimp and Inkscape: for straight graphics and title cards
• VIM: My new favorite text file for editing all of those avisynth scripts.

I also took a moment to clean up the page where all of these videos live, and added a nice little popup video viewer to help save some space.

This also means it’s time for me to get back to work on the next tutorials!

Click the thumbnail below for a popup video — I hope you enjoy it!