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.

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

eBGDAEG3333CG003GD77755G33G3333eBGDAECG003GD77755G3

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.

Keep exploring

Free on the App Store

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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