Want to learn to play Silent Night on the piano? You have come to the right place!
Silent Night is one of the most famous Christmas carols in the world. Of Germanic origin, it was first sung on the occasion of Christmas in 1818 in Austria. Written by the priest Jospeh Mohr and composed by the musician Franz Xaver Gruber, it gradually gained notoriety to become one of the musical emblems of Christmas.
Since 2011, Silent Night has even been included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
This is why many beginners want to learn it on the piano. Its notoriety as well as the ease with which it can be played makes it one of the favorite songs for beginning pianists.
In this article, we suggest you learn how to play Silent Night on the piano. We will first see the notes to play with the right hand, those to play with the left hand, as well as tutorial videos showing you the notes to play with both hands.
At the end of this article, you will be able to play the whole song on the piano.
You can also find the free piano sheet music of Silent Night at the end of this tutorial.
Bonus: you can also learn to play this song at your own pace on our piano learning application La Touche Musicale.
Bonus : you can also learn to play this song at your own pace on our interactive piano learning app La Touche Musicale.
Free download: >> >> The guide to learn 10 easy piano pieces.
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Before we get to the heart of the matter and learn Silent Night, we must first give a brief summary of the position of each note on a piano keyboard. You can find the same explanation on our tutorial dedicated to learning the notes of We Wish You a Merry Christmas on the piano and the one about Zelda’s Lullaby Piano Tutorial.
The diagram below shows the location of each note (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) on the keyboard:
The name of the notes on a piano keyboard.
When you look at the picture above, you can see that the series of notes on the piano keys are repeated. There are 7 white keys one after the other that display all the notes (A, B, C, …). Once you reach the 8th note, the series repeats itself identically. This series of 7 notes in a row is what we call an octave.
To identify the position of a particular note on the piano keyboard, you can use the black keys as a visual cue. You will notice that the black keys work in groups: one group of two black keys and one group of three. These groups allow you to find your way around the piano more easily and thus identify the notes more easily.
For example, if we are looking for the note E, we will first try to identify a group of two black keys. Once we have found this group, we know that the note E is just to the right of these two black keys. There you go, you’ve found your E!
If you are interested in learning easy music with piano notes, you might like our article about piano songs with letters.
Before we learn how to play all the notes with the right hand, let’s first see where to start on the keyboard.
The first note to play with the right hand on Silent Night is the G. So place your finger on the G note on the piano, which is about halfway down the keyboard:
G is the first note of the right hand in the song Silent Night on piano.
Once you have found the first note, you must now play all the following notes with your right hand in order to reproduce the melody of the song. Press each of the following notes one after the other:
G – A – G – E – G – A – G – E – D – D – B – C – C – G – A – A – C – B – A – G – A – G – E – A – A – C – B – A – G – A – G – E – D – D – F – D – B – C – E – C – G – E – G – F.
By playing all these notes in a row, you will reproduce the whole right hand of Silent Night on the piano.
We advise you to play this series of notes in a loop in order to learn it as quickly as possible.
Now let’s move on to the left hand.
Silent Night on the piano: the notes of the right hand.
Before moving on to the left hand, we suggest you watch this tutorial video that shows you all the notes to play with the right hand for the song Silent Night: [Note: you must remain pressed on the key while the note is on it on the virtual piano] :
La Touche Musicale app waits for you to play the right note with your right hand on your piano before moving on to the next one.
For the left hand, we will proceed in the same way as the right hand. We will first identify the first note we have to play with this hand and then all the following ones.
The left hand of Silent Night on the piano starts with the note C. Press this note with one of the fingers of your left hand to begin:
C is the first note of the left hand in the song Silent Night.
Did you find the first C note? Great! Now let’s move on to all the other notes in the left hand.
To play them, you must press the following notes in succession:
C – C – B – A – G – G – C – F – F – C – F – F – C – B – A – G – G – C – C – G – D – C.
If you play all these notes in a row on the keyboard, you will have the whole left hand of Silent Night on the piano, accompanying the right hand and giving depth to the melody of the song.
Silent Night on the piano: the notes of the left hand.
As for the right hand, we suggest you watch the following tutorial video in order to respect the beats of the notes of the left hand and the tempo of the song:
The La Touche Musicale app waits for you to play the correct note with your left hand on your piano before moving on to the next.
Did you manage to play the left hand of Silent Night too? Perfect!
But now the hardest part is to play both hands at the same time. That’s what we’ll see in this last part of the piano tutorial.
Dissociating movements that are performed simultaneously is never easy. The brain is not used to this type of exercise.
It is the same when you start playing the piano. If you are a beginner, you will certainly find it difficult to play the notes with both hands at the same time.
But don’t panic! This problem is very common and can be solved with hard work.
There are also a number of techniques and tricks that can help you gain this mastery more quickly. This is what we are going to talk about right now.
To learn how to dissociate your hands when you play the piano, there are techniques and tricks.
For example, you can, as we have chosen to do in this tutorial on Silent Night, start by playing the notes of the right hand and then those of the left hand. Your brain will then already have a theoretical basis to build on when you play both hands simultaneously.
Once you’ve done this exercise and are starting to play both hands, we recommend that you work in short sequences. Cut the song or exercise you are learning into several parts of a few seconds each. Practice the first part on a loop. Once you’ve mastered it, move on to the second. Once you have mastered it, play both parts in a row.
This technique allows your brain to assimilate the information more quickly. If you go too fast and play the first 30 seconds of a song in one go, you may take much longer and get discouraged.
Note: At La Touche Musicale, we call this technique the “learning loop”. Noticing the effectiveness of this technique on piano learning, we decided to integrate a feature into our online piano learning app that allows you to loop any part of the song and learn it very quickly.
You can also work on your scales. Scales are exercises that work on both hand dissociation and your dexterity. In addition to the songs that you learn at the piano, we advise you to practice scales which will be very useful in your piano practice.
You have practiced hand dissociation and are now ready to play Silent Night on the piano? Congratulations! Let’s see now the notes to play with both hands through a video tutorial.
Silent Night on the piano: the notes of both hands.
As we have done for each hand independently, we suggest you watch this video tutorial showing each of the notes to be played with the left hand and the right hand at the same time.
This will allow you to know the different tempo and when the notes should be played.
To take the time to assimilate the notes, you can of course pause the video.
Note: on La Touche Musicale app, you don’t need to pause the song. The application waits for you until you play the right note.
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The La Touche Musicale app waits for you to play the right notes with both hands on your piano before moving on to the next.
You can now play Silent Night entirely on the piano, congratulations!
You can also learn other songs and genres that will bring diversity to your repertoire by checking out our articles about sad piano music, best jazz songs to play on piano, and best rap piano songs.
You can also find other piano tutorials of this type by consulting for example the one dedicated to how to learn Für Elise, Deck the Halls, Carol of the Bells, Greensleeves, Amazing Grace, Rhapsody in Blue, Jingle Bells piano notes, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Turkish March, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, All I Want for Christmas is You or Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano.
You can easily find Silent Night piano sheet music on the web. Many websites offer them for free or for a fee. But, in addition to teaching you how to play the song through text explanations, diagrams and video tutorials, we thought it would also be convenient to provide you with a link to download the piano sheet music of the popular Christmas song for free.
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