PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsRow, Row, Row Your Boat

guitar song · Strings

Row, Row, Row Your Boat Guitar Tab

Composer
Traditional
Year
1852
Key
C
Time
6/8
Tempo
150 BPM
Difficulty
Beginner · ★
First note
C4

Row, Row, Row Your Boat 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 - - D - -

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Lyrics

Bar 1 — Row, row, row your boat

Bar 3 — Gently down the stream

Bar 5 — Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Bar 7 — Life is but a dream

Trad. American round, 1852 — public domain.

How to practise this on guitar

Row, Row, Row Your Boat is in C and the tab opens on C4 — 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 150 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 27 notes across 8 bars, from C4 up to C5 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 Row, Row, Row Your Boat cross-instrument hub.

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Play Row, Row, Row Your Boat — 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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