PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsOld MacDonald Had a Farm
guitar song · Strings
Old MacDonald Had a Farm Guitar Tab
- Composer
- Traditional
- Year
- 1917
- Key
- G
- Time
- 4/4
- Tempo
- 108 BPM
- Difficulty
- Beginner · ★
- First note
- G4
Old MacDonald Had a Farm 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 — Old MacDonald had a farm
Bar 3 — E-I-E-I-O!
Bar 4 — And on that farm he had a cow
Bar 7 — E-I-E-I-O!
Trad. American, 1917 collection — public domain.
How to practise this on guitar
Old MacDonald Had a Farm is in G 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 108 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 8 bars, from D4 up to B4 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 Old MacDonald Had a Farm cross-instrument hub.
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Play Old MacDonald Had a Farm — 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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