The Skye Boat Song
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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
- 577 ms
- Ornaments
- 0
- Quick leaps
- 1
- Span
- 12
- Black keys
- 0%
per note, at 104 bpm
nothing to decorate
of a fourth or wider
semitones, D4 to D5
it never leaves its key
- nothing in it moves faster than about 577 ms a note, so the hands are never rushed
- it covers 47 notes across 12 phrases, which is how it is taught in the app, one breath at a time
What you can play it on
8 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
- Kalimba at written pitch
- Handpan down 5 semitones
- Violin at written pitch
- Xylophone up 1 octave
- Guzheng down 5 semitones
- Accordion at written pitch
- Drums not this one
Where this transcription came from
Scottish, traditional: the air is a Gaelic rowing song, the words are Sir Harold Boulton's from 1884 - both long out of copyright. Notes read from the plain (unornamented) setting on thesession.org/tunes/3690, which is pure G major pentatonic; the ornamented settings of the same tune add an F sharp and would fall off the pans. Verse, chorus, verse.
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.