Jingle Bells
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?
Easy, 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
- 438 ms
- Ornaments
- 0
- Quick leaps
- 0
- Span
- 14
- Black keys
- 1%
per note, at 120 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, G3 to A4
of the notes
- nothing in it moves faster than about 438 ms a note, so the hands are never rushed
- it spans 14 semitones, wider than an octave
- it covers 92 notes across 16 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
The chorus everybody starts with, then the verse, then the chorus again to close - the round trip the song is actually sung in. The verse ("Dashing through the snow…") is read from Wikimedia Commons' "Jingle Bells verse Ab.mid" (public domain, the article's own audio): midi_read.py Jingle_Bells_verse_Ab.mid 0 44 --track 2 --scale 2 transposed down eight semitones so its A flat sits in this table's C. The verse carries the song's one black key - the F sharp under "what fun it is to ride", the source's own chromatic climb - and dips to the G below middle C, which is why the diatonic instruments only offer this song's chorus… and they get the whole chorus, which is stage 0. The closing chorus repeats the opening phrases verbatim: nothing new is transcribed, the song just comes home.
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.