PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsThe Itsy Bitsy Spider
guitar song · Strings
The Itsy Bitsy Spider Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Traditional
- Year
- 1910
- Key
- C
- Time
- 6/8
- Tempo
- 138 BPM
- Difficulty
- Beginner · ★
- First note
- G3
The Itsy Bitsy Spider 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 — The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout
Bar 6 — Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Bar 10 — Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
Bar 13 — And the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again
Trad. American, 1910 collection — public domain, simplified setting.
How to practise this on guitar
The Itsy Bitsy Spider is in C and the tab opens on G3 — 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 138 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 46 notes across 17 bars, from G3 up to G4 in 6/8 time.
Also playable on
The same melody is graded across 7 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the The Itsy Bitsy Spider cross-instrument hub.
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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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