PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsJoy to the World

guitar song · Strings

Joy to the World Guitar Tab

Composer
Lowell Mason
Year
1848
Key
C
Time
2/4
Tempo
100 BPM
Difficulty
Easy · ★★
First note
C5

Joy to the World 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.

Tuning: E A D G B e (standard) · Strum: D DU

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Lowell Mason, 1848, after Handel; words Isaac Watts — public domain.

How to practise this on guitar

Joy to the World is in C and the tab opens on C5 — 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 100 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 57 notes across 19 bars, from C4 up to C5 in 2/4 time.

Also playable on

The same melody is graded across 7 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the Joy to the World cross-instrument hub.

Keep exploring

Free on the App Store

Play Joy to the World — 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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