PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsHappy Birthday to You
guitar song · Strings
Happy Birthday to You Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Mildred and Patty Hill
- Year
- 1893
- Key
- G
- Time
- 3/4
- Tempo
- 90 BPM
- Difficulty
- Beginner · ★
- First note
- D4
Happy Birthday to You 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 — Happy birthday to you
Bar 3 — Happy birthday to you
Bar 5 — Happy birthday, dear [name]
Bar 7 — Happy birthday to you
Mildred & Patty Hill, 1893 — public domain.
How to practise this on guitar
Happy Birthday to You is in G and the tab opens on D4 — 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 90 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 25 notes across 9 bars, from D4 up to D5 in 3/4 time.
Also playable on
The same melody is graded across 5 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the Happy Birthday to You cross-instrument hub.
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Play Happy Birthday to You — and hear every note graded.
Soloist Guitar reads this six-string guitar tab in standard tuning under the notation and grades your take on-device, note by note — free on iPhone, no ads, no account.
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