PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsThe Black Velvet Band
guitar song · Strings
The Black Velvet Band Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Traditional
- Year
- —
- Key
- C
- Time
- 3/4
- Tempo
- 120 BPM
- Difficulty
- Beginner · ★
- First note
- G4
The Black Velvet Band on guitar
The full melody, rendered as six-string guitar tab in standard tuning you can read on screen or print for the stand — free, and never truncated.
Lyrics
Bar 1 — In a neat little town they call Belfast
Bar 5 — apprenticed to trade I was bound
Bar 9 — and many an hour's sweet happiness
Bar 13 — I spent in that neat little town
Bar 17 — Her eyes they shone like diamonds
Bar 21 — I thought her the queen of the land
Bar 25 — and her hair it hung over her shoulder
Bar 29 — tied up with a black velvet band
Trad. Irish ballad, 19th c. — public domain.
How to practise this on guitar
The Black Velvet Band is in C and the tab opens on G4 — find that fret, settle your hand there, and notice how little it has to move: the arrangement is worked out with a fret-hand position economy, so consecutive notes stay under your fingers instead of leaping up and down the neck. Read the numbers, not the note names: string line plus fret is the whole instruction, and an open string costs you nothing.
Play it well under around 120 BPM with a metronome and let each note ring into the next — the tails under the numbers show you how long. When your take review marks a bar, loop just that bar until the fret-hand shift inside it feels automatic, then rejoin the line. Speed is the last thing you add, never the first. By the numbers, this setting runs 72 notes across 32 bars, from G3 up to G4 in 3/4 time.
Also playable on
The same melody is graded across 6 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the The Black Velvet Band cross-instrument hub.
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