Greensleeves
Loading the instrument… Pitch runs up the page and time across it. Touch a note to hear it, or play the whole melody. Sound could not load.
How hard is it?
Medium, and not because someone remembered it that way. These five numbers come off the melody itself, the same way the app grades its lessons.
- Fastest passage
- 398 ms
- Ornaments
- 0
- Quick leaps
- 0
- Span
- 15
- Black keys
- 31%
per note, at 132 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, B3 to D5
of the notes
- nothing in it moves faster than about 398 ms a note, so the hands are never rushed
- it spans 15 semitones, wider than an octave
- 31% of its notes fall on black keys
- it covers 72 notes across 14 phrases, which is how it is taught in the app, one breath at a time
What you can play it on
4 of the instruments in the workshop can teach this tune. Where the number differs from "all of them", the reason is the instrument, not the song: a diatonic kalimba has no sharps, and a pentatonic handpan or guzheng has no fourth or seventh at all.
- Piano at written pitch
- Guitar at written pitch
- Violin at written pitch
- Accordion at written pitch
- Kalimba not this one
- Handpan not this one
- Guzheng not this one
- Drums not this one
- Xylophone not this one
Where this transcription came from
English, 16th century, traditional and public domain. Pitches from the ABC setting on thesession.org/tunes/1598, in E minor. THE FIRST SONG HERE WITH BLACK KEYS - its raised D#, C# and F# are what the tune is: strip them and it is not Greensleeves. The diatonic kalimba and xylophone and the pentatonic pans cannot play it, and are not offered it.
Every melody in this catalogue is public domain and was transcribed from a named source, then checked against it by a tool rather than by ear. None of them was written down from memory - which is the usual reason two versions of a folk tune on the internet disagree.
Learn it properly
Tapping the ribbon is not the same as playing it. In the app this melody arrives as a lesson: the notes fall in time on the instrument you picked, the board waits when you miss, and it counts the phrase again rather than moving on.