PlaysoloistStringsGuitarSongsYankee Doodle

guitar song · Strings

Yankee Doodle Guitar Tab

Composer
Traditional
Year
Key
G
Time
4/4
Tempo
100 BPM
Difficulty
Beginner · ★
First note
G4

Yankee Doodle 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 D DU

eBGDAEGD7888101212121012GD712121012121112eBGDAEGC121210121312108D7G770788CG0707078eBGDAED7G707503CG02030230D7G332533

Lyrics

Bar 1 — Yankee Doodle went to town

Bar 2 — a-riding on a pony

Bar 3 — stuck a feather in his cap

Bar 4 — and called it macaroni

Bar 5 — Yankee Doodle, keep it up

Bar 6 — Yankee Doodle dandy

Bar 7 — mind the music and the step

Bar 8 — and with the girls be handy

Trad. American, 18th c. — public domain.

How to practise this on guitar

Yankee Doodle 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 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 8 bars, from B3 up to C5 in 4/4 time.

Also playable on

The same melody is graded across 6 Playsoloist instruments. See every version, with difficulty and provenance, on the Yankee Doodle cross-instrument hub.

Keep exploring

Free on the App Store

Play Yankee Doodle — 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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