Want to learn to play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano? You’ve come to the right place!
This song is a very famous nursery rhyme sung in English and of American origin, which dates from the beginning of the 19th century.
Mary Had a Little Lamb was first published in 1830 by Marsh, Capen & Lyon as an original poem by American writer Sarah Josepha Hale.
Today, it is one of the most popular nursery rhymes in the world.
It is no wonder that it has appealed to so many beginning pianists because of its popularity and ease of playing.
In this article, we propose to teach you how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano by covering the notes to be played with the left hand, those to be played with the right hand, and video tutorials in order to master the rhythm, the beats of the notes and the overall tempo of the song.
Finally, you will find at the end of the article the free piano sheet music of Mary Had a Little Lamb to download in PDF.
Bonus: you can also learn this song at your own pace on our piano learning application La Touche Musicale.
Bonus : you can also learn to play this song at your own pace on our interactive piano learning app La Touche Musicale.
Free download: >> >> The guide to learn 10 easy piano pieces.
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Before discussing the notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb to be played on the piano, we must first go back to the basics: the identification of the different notes on a piano keyboard (C, D, E, F, G, A, B). We reproduced the same exercise on our articles about All I Want for Christmas is You piano notes and Carol of the Bells piano tutorial.
A classical keyboard has 88 keys. Each key is affiliated with a musical note.
To find out what the notes are, refer to the following diagram:
The name of the notes on a piano keyboard.
If you look at the picture above, you can see that the same notes keep coming up on the keyboard.
A piano keyboard is indeed made of several parts, themselves composed of 7 white keys that have a different letter (or note).
Once you reach the eighth note, you start a new octave and the notes start again in the same order.
To find your way around a keyboard easily, you can use the black keys. You can see that each octave has two groups of black keys: one group of two and one group of three.
To identify a note easily in an octave, you can therefore look at where it is located in relation to these groups of black keys. Is it next to the group of two black keys? Is it inside a group of three?
By answering this question, you will easily find the note you are looking for.
If you are interested in learning tracks with piano notes, you might like our article about the easiest piano songs with letters.
Before discussing all the notes to play with the right hand on the piano, we will first identify the first note of Mary Had a Little Lamb to press.
The first note of the right hand in this famous nursery rhyme is the E, which is located near the middle of the piano keyboard, to the right of the group of two black keys:
E is the first note of the right hand in the song Mary Had a Little Lamb on piano.
Once you press the first E note of the song, you have your first cue.
We can then start playing all the following notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb with the right hand. Press each of these notes one after the other:
E – D – C – D – E – E – E – D – D – E – G – G – E – D – C – D – E – E – E – D – E – D – E – D – C – E – D – C – D – E – E – E – D – D – E – G – G – E – D – C – D – E – E – E – E – D – D – E – D – C.
This sequence of notes corresponds to the whole right hand of the song played on the piano.
You will see that by playing the notes quickly enough one after the other, you will recognize the famous melody very quickly.
Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano: the notes of the right hand.
To help you respect the beats of each note and the tempo of the song, we have prepared a video tutorial that will provide you with audiovisual cues [Note: you must remain pressed on the key while the note is on it on the virtual piano] :
In order to learn to play the right hand of Mary Had a Little Lamb easily, we recommend that you play the sequence of notes shown above in a loop.
Force yourself to gradually let go of the visual to play the notes by heart.
By practicing diligently, you will find that you will be able to play the right hand in no time, even if you are a beginner.
Play the notes ofMary Had a Little Lamb with the right hand on an interactive app
La Touche Musicale app waits for you to play the right note with your right hand on your piano before moving on to the next one.
As for the right hand, before playing all the notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb with the left hand, you will have to identify the first note to play. The left hand of this popular song starts with the note C :
C is the first note of the left hand in the song Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Once you have found the note C, which is the first note to be played with the left hand, you will have to play the following notes on your keyboard one after the other:
C – G – C – G – G – D – C – G – C – G – G – D – C – C – G – C – G – G – D – C – G – C – G – C – G – G – D – C.
This succession of notes corresponds to the whole melody of Mary Had a Little Lamb played with the left hand on the piano.
As for the right hand, play the notes in a loop to learn it very quickly.
The left hand is important because it will accompany the melody of the song (corresponding to the right hand).
Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano: the notes of the left hand.
As we did for the right hand, we have put together a tutorial video that shows you how to play each note of the left hand:
Play the notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb with the left hand on an interactive app
The La Touche Musicale app waits for you to play the correct note with your left hand on your piano before moving on to the next.
Congratulations! You can now play the notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb with your right hand and with your left hand!
But the hardest part is yet to come… You must now know how to play both hands at the same time in order to reproduce the whole song.
When starting to play the piano, the dissociation of the hands is one of the most difficult exercises. This exercise requires our brain to precisely manage different gestures with both hands, and it is not something it is used to dealing with.
That’s why we’ve broken down this Mary Had a Little Lamb tutorial article into three distinct sections: learning the left hand notes, the right hand notes and finally both hands at the same time. This allows a progressive learning of the song.
To make this hand-dissociation exercise a little easier, there are a few techniques and tricks.
As mentioned in the previous section, you can start by working on the hands separately to get used to the song, its notes and its tempo. That’s what we did in this piano tutorial for the song Mary Had a Little lamb.
Once you have done this, you can start playing with both hands. We recommend that you start by playing short passages of the song. For instance, you could start with the first 5 seconds. Once you have mastered that passage with both hands, move on to the next 5 seconds. Once you have that second part, go through the first 10 seconds of the song.
This method promotes gradual learning and avoids going too fast and getting discouraged.
You will see that after a few days, this technique will pay off and you will learn more and more quickly.
At La Touche Musicale, we call this technique the “learning loop”. Noticing the effectiveness of this technique on piano learning, we decided to integrate a feature into our online piano learning app that allows you to loop any part of the track and learn it very quickly.
Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano: the notes of both hands.
As we did for the right and left hand, below is a tutorial video showing the notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb to be played with both hands at the same time.
Take the time to look at the timing of the notes and get the right tempo for the song.
You can also pause the video so that you can see the notes to be played at a specific time.
Note: on La Touche Musicale app, you don’t need to pause the song. The application waits for you until you play the right note.
Play the notes of Mary Had a Little Lamb with both hands on an interactive app
The La Touche Musicale app waits for you to play the right notes with both hands on your piano before moving on to the next.
Congratulations! You can now play one of America’s oldest and most popular nursery rhymes! You can also learn other songs and genres that will bring diversity to your repertoire by checking out our articles about sad piano music, jazz songs to play on piano, and rap piano songs.
If you liked this article, you can find other piano tutorials such as We Wish You a Merry Christmas, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Jingle Bells, Für Elise, Amazing Grace, Silent Night, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Turkish March, Greensleeves, Rhapsody in Blue, Zelda’s Lullaby or Deck the Halls.
You can easily find Mary Had a Little Lamb piano sheet music on the web. But, in addition to teaching you how to play the song through text explanations, diagrams and video tutorials, we thought it would also be convenient to provide you with a link to download the piano sheet music in PDF of the popular nursery rhymes.
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