Easy piano song, sheet music with note names
Happy Birthday piano notes: letters and easy sheet music
Happy Birthday piano notes: the whole tune with letter names and octaves, in G major, 3/4, D4 to D5. Play it and print it (A4 and Letter PDF).
Two kinds of page: the tune with a letter name under every note, and a worksheet with the names left blank.
Download the PDF kit
Free to print and share. No sign-up, no e-mail, no watermark. A4 for most of the world, Letter for the US and Canada; both are black and white, with the fonts embedded.
Quick answer
Happy Birthday to You on this page is the whole tune: 25 notes in 8 bars of 3/4, in G major, with a range of D4 to D5 (12 semitones). It begins on D4 and ends on G4. Below: the letter names with octave numbers, the notes on the staff, a version you can play, a note-name worksheet and the checks that were run.
Happy Birthday to You at a glance
- Key
- G major (one sharp)
- Time signature
- 3/4: three beats to the bar, each a quarter note
- Range
- D4 to D5, 12 semitones
- Notes and bars
- 25 notes, 8 bars after a pick-up
- First note
- D4 (scale degree 5)
- Last note
- G4 (scale degree 1)
- Tune
- the song “Good Morning to All”, traditionally attributed to the sisters Patty and Mildred J. Hill in 1893 (Wikipedia says the claim that they composed the tune is disputed)
- First in print with these words
- the tune and the birthday words first appeared together in print around 1911 to 1912, according to Wikipedia
- Copyright
- in the public domain in the United States and the European Union, according to Wikipedia (see the question below)
- Tempo on this page
- quarter note = 90; the score printed in the Wikipedia article marks quarter note = 90
- Hands
- Right hand: the melody shown on the staff. The left hand is not shown on this page; play the tune with the right hand alone, or add any simple bass notes.
- Level
- Medium: wider than a major sixth (12 semitones); sixteenth notes; a leap of a minor sixth or more. How the level is worked out
Press a note on the staff to hear it. The sound is made in your browser from the notes of this page (a plain synthesiser, not a recording). Normal speed is quarter note = 90: the score printed in the Wikipedia article marks quarter note = 90.
Happy Birthday to You
G major · 3/4 · melody with note names
Key G major (one sharp: F♯) Range D4 to D5 Music tune of “Good Morning to All”, attributed to Patty and Mildred J. Hill (1893)
Scale of G major G A B C D E F♯ Middle C is C4, the C nearest the middle of the keyboard
Melody: Wikipedia, "Happy Birthday to You" (score 1 in the article) (CC BY-SA 4.0; revision 1361169877 of 2026-06-26), checked note by note against 2 other sources. Free to print and share under the same licence, CC BY-SA 4.0. musictheoryprint.com/charts/happy-birthday-piano-notes
Happy Birthday to You: name the notes
G major · 3/4 · worksheet
Name Date Class
Write the letter name of every note on the line under it. The key signature tells you which notes are sharp: F♯. The home note of the key is G.
Check your answers against the sheet with the note names. Extra: circle every note that is a G, the home note of the key.
Melody: Wikipedia, "Happy Birthday to You" (score 1 in the article) (CC BY-SA 4.0). Free to print and share under the same licence, CC BY-SA 4.0. musictheoryprint.com/charts/happy-birthday-piano-notes
The notes of Happy Birthday to You, bar by bar
25 notes in 8 bars, after a pick-up, in G major. Each note is a letter and an octave number: C4 is middle C, the C nearest the middle of the keyboard, and the numbers go up by one at every C. The ♯ and ♭ mean the black key above or below the letter. “held” means a tied note that is not played again; “rest” is silence.
| Bar | Right hand (melody) | do re mi |
|---|---|---|
| pick-up | D4 D4 | sol sol |
| 1 | E4 D4 G4 | la sol do |
| 2 | F♯4 D4 D4 | ti sol sol |
| 3 | E4 D4 A4 | la sol re |
| 4 | G4 D4 D4 | do sol sol |
| 5 | D5 B4 G4 | sol mi do |
| 6 | F♯4 E4 C5 C5 | ti la fa fa |
| 7 | B4 G4 A4 | mi do re |
| 8 | G4 | do |
do re mi uses movable do: do is G.
Which keys to press
The tune spans 8 letter names, from D4 to D5. A hand in one five-finger position covers five, so the hand has to shift position (or stretch) at least once; an octave is eight letter names. Try the notes on the virtual piano or press a note on the staff above to hear it.
What the tune is made of
How the melody moves
Each of the 24 moves from one note to the next, counted.
Which note lengths it uses
Every note counted by its length, as a fraction of a whole note.
Most-used note: D4 (8 times). Longest run of one repeated note: 2. Different pitches: 8, made from 7 note names (some are used in two octaves). Biggest leap: 12 semitones.
How the notes were checked
Not one note on this page was typed in or remembered. The melody is read by a program from Wikipedia, "Happy Birthday to You" (score 1 in the article) (CC BY-SA 4.0; revision 1361169877 of 2026-06-26). A second program then looked for the same notes, in the same order, in each of the sources below, which were typeset or encoded by other people. The number is the share of this page’s notes that are found there, whatever key the other source is in.
| Source | Licence | Notes there | Same pitches | Same pitches and lengths |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikimedia Commons, "Happy birthday to you (Zum Geburtstag viel Glück).mid"uploaded 2024-05-16, SHA-1 fa1ca595c6 | Public domain | 56 | 100% | 76% |
| Commons SVG score "Joyeux anniversaire patty mildred hill.svg" (G major system), read by eyeuploaded 2026-06-06 | CC0 1.0 | 25 | 100% | 100% |
The second column is lower than the first because editions write the same long notes in different ways (a half note and a tied pair, a held last note) and because performance MIDI files shorten or lengthen notes. Pitch is the part that matters for the letter names. A MIDI file of a whole piano piece does not say which notes are the melody, so the program takes the highest note at each moment; a melody note that sits under a higher accompaniment note can be missed, and that is the usual reason for a “no matching note” above.
Happy Birthday to You: questions people ask
What are the letter notes of Happy Birthday to You?
The first notes, with their octave numbers, are D4 D4 E4 D4 G4 F♯4 D4 D4 E4 D4 A4 G4. Every note of the whole tune is in the table above, one bar per row (middle C is C4, the C nearest the middle of the keyboard; the next C up is C5).
What key and time signature is Happy Birthday to You in?
On this page it is in G major (one sharp), in 3/4: three beats to the bar, each a quarter note. G major is the key of the edition used here; the CC0 score checked by eye prints the tune in two keys, C major and G major, with the same notes.
Which hand plays what, and how high and low does it go?
The range is D4 to D5, 12 semitones; 3.4% of the first vocal lines in the OpenScore Lieder Corpus have a smaller range and 89.9% a larger one. The tune spans 8 letter names, from D4 to D5. A hand in one five-finger position covers five, so the hand has to shift position (or stretch) at least once; an octave is eight letter names.
Is this the whole of Happy Birthday to You?
Yes, for the tune: 8 bars after a two-note pick-up carry all four lines of the song. The words are not printed on this page.
Is Happy Birthday to You free to print and share?
Wikipedia reports that the music and lyrics are in the public domain in the United States and the European Union. A US federal court ruled in 2016 that Warner/Chappell’s copyright claim to the song was invalid; in an earlier ruling, on 22 September 2015, Judge George H. King found that the company’s 1935 copyright covered only a specific piano arrangement, not the lyrics or the melody. In the EU the copyright expired on 1 January 2017. This page prints only the melody. That is a summary of what Wikipedia says, not legal advice; arrangements and recordings can still be protected, and rules differ between countries.
How do I know the notes are right?
The melody is read by a program from Wikipedia, "Happy Birthday to You" (score 1 in the article), never typed in. A second program then compares it, note by note and in order, with 2 other sources: MIDI file “Happy birthday to you (Zum Geburtstag viel Glück)” (100% of its notes); the CC0 score read by eye (100% of its notes). 2 of the 2 agree with this page on every pitch. Where they differ, the page lists every note and bar, so you can see the difference.
Where does the Happy Birthday tune come from?
The tune is from “Good Morning to All”, a song for young children that Patty Hill, a kindergarten principal in Louisville, Kentucky, and her sister Mildred, a pianist and composer, are credited with in 1893. Wikipedia says it was published in their songbook Song Stories for the Kindergarten (Chicago: Clayton F. Summy) and that the claim the sisters composed the tune is disputed.
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Happy Birthday to You in real music: the numbers
In G major the tune uses 7 of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, all of them inside the key. It moves by step 11 times out of 24, and ends on the home note, as 75% of major-key art songs do.
This tune against real art songs
| What | This tune | OpenScore Lieder (880 major-key songs) |
|---|---|---|
| First note | D4 (degree 5) | 41.7% start on degree 5 |
| Last note | G4 (degree 1) | 75.1% end on degree 1 |
| Range of the tune | 12 semitones (D4 to D5) | 3% of 1,458 first vocal lines span fewer semitones, 90% more |
The art-song numbers are for the first vocal line of every major-key song whose key signature does not change; the numbers for this tune are counted on the melody printed above.
How common G major is
| Collection | Items with a key | Share in G major | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenScore Lieder | 1,462 | 8.1% | 3 of 24 |
| Mutopia | 1,974 | 14.5% | 2 of 24 |
| MusicBrainz works | 13,669 | 9.8% | 3 of 24 |
| MusicBrainz works | 5,340 | 8.9% | 2 of 24 |
| Open Opus work titles | 3,587 | 8.7% | 3 of 24 |
| AcousticBrainz recordings | 63,124 | 6.7% | 4 of 24 |
Counts of key signatures (and estimated major or minor) in the collections the site has measured; see the key page for G major.
Where the tune sits among singers' ranges
| Voice type (as labelled in the scores) | Typical range of a real song line | This tune (D4 to D5) |
|---|---|---|
| Soprano | E♭4 to F5 | fits if moved up 1 semitone |
| Alto / Contralto | C4 to C5 | fits if moved down 2 semitones |
| Tenor | F3 to F♯4 | fits if moved down 8 semitones |
| Baritone | C3 to E4 | fits if moved down 10 semitones |
| Bass | A2 to C4 | fits if moved down 14 semitones |
Typical range = the median across song lines of the lowest and highest notes (ignoring one stray note each side), from 285 vocal lines in the OpenScore Lieder Corpus. "Fits" means both ends of the tune are inside it.
Method
- This tune's own numbers are counted by a script on the decoded melody (tied notes counted once, rests ignored).
- Art-song numbers are read from the files behind the site's statistics pages (OpenScore Lieder Corpus: key and scale-degree counts for the first vocal line of every piece, vocal ranges of 1,458 lines).
- Key counts for Mutopia and MusicBrainz come from the same published statistics; a key is counted from its key signature.
Data: computed from the OpenScore Lieder Corpus (CC0), 1,462 scores. Snapshot: commit 6b2dc542ce (2026-04-07).
Background
Excerpts from open reference works, reproduced as published (references, images and tables removed). Every excerpt names its source, licence and original article.
About “Happy Birthday to You”
Overview
"Happy Birthday to You", or simply "Happy Birthday", is an American song traditionally sung to celebrate a person's birthday. According to the 1998 Guinness World Records, it is the most recognized song in the English language, followed by "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow". The song's base lyrics have been translated into at least 18 languages. The melody of "Happy Birthday to You" comes from the song "Good Morning to All", which has traditionally been attributed to American sisters Patty and Mildred J. Hill in 1893, although the claim that the sisters composed the tune is disputed.
History
Patty Hill was a kindergarten principal in Louisville, Kentucky, developing teaching methods at the Little Loomhouse; her sister Mildred was a pianist and composer. The sisters used "Good Morning to All" as a song that young children would find easy to sing. The combination of melody and lyrics in "Happy Birthday to You" first appeared in print in 1912. None of the early appearances of the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics included credits or copyright notices. The Summy Company registered a copyright in 1935, crediting authors Preston Ware Orem and Mrs. R. R. Forman. In 1988, Warner/Chappell Music purchased the company owning the copyright for 25 million, with the value of "Happy Birthday" estimated at 5 million. Warner claimed that the United States copyright would not expire until 2030 and that unauthorized public performances of the song were illegal unless royalties were paid. In February 2010, the royalty for a single use was 700. By one estimate, the song is the highest-earning single song in history. In the European Union, the copyright for the song expired on January 1, 2017.
Source: Wikipedia, “Happy Birthday to You” — CC BY-SA 4.0 — text excerpted; see the article for the full text and authors. Revision of 2026-06-26.
Sources and licences for the text, scores and recordings on this page are on the credits page.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Happy Birthday to You" (score 1 in the article), Wikimedia Commons, "Happy birthday to you (Zum Geburtstag viel Glück).mid", Commons SVG score "Joyeux anniversaire patty mildred hill.svg" (G major system), read by eye.