PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsFor He's a Jolly Good Fellow
guitar song · Strings
For He's a Jolly Good Fellow Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Traditional
- Year
- —
- Key
- G
- Time
- 6/8
- Tempo
- 132 BPM
- Difficulty
- Beginner · ★
- First note
- D5
For He's a Jolly Good Fellow 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 — For he's a jolly good fellow
Bar 3 — for he's a jolly good fellow
Bar 5 — for he's a jolly good fellow
Bar 7 — which nobody can deny
Bar 9 — Which nobody can deny
Bar 11 — which nobody can deny
Bar 13 — For he's a jolly good fellow
Bar 15 — for he's a jolly good fellow
Bar 17 — for he's a jolly good fellow
Bar 19 — which nobody can deny
Trad. (Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre, 18th c.) — public domain.
How to practise this on guitar
For He's a Jolly Good Fellow is in G and the tab opens on D5 — 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 132 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 79 notes across 21 bars, from G4 up to E5 in 6/8 time.
Also playable on
The same melody is graded across 6 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the For He's a Jolly Good Fellow cross-instrument hub.
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