PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsCamptown Races
guitar song · Strings
Camptown Races Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Stephen Foster
- Year
- 1850
- Key
- C
- Time
- 4/4
- Tempo
- 120 BPM
- Difficulty
- Beginner · ★
- First note
- G4
Camptown Races 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.
Stephen Foster, 1850 — public domain.
How to practise this on guitar
Camptown Races 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 48 notes across 16 bars, from C4 up to C5 in 4/4 time.
Also playable on
The same melody is graded across 7 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the Camptown Races cross-instrument hub.
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