Just a little back history is that the Yankee Doodle actually emerged as a military song in the 1700s. During the American War of Independence, it was used by both British and American soldiers to ridicule the other side. Some sources think that the actual melody of Yankee Doodle could have predated all this by centuries, having originated in Western Europe as far back as the 15th century. As we know, It later became a popular folk tune. And I understand that today it's even being adopted by Connecticut as it states some, regardless of Yankee Doodle is history though, I chose it because it's a great example of a military match, which uses the meter have to fall also a relatively common meter. What this time signature indicates is that there are only two quarter notes per bar.
The strong beaten to four time is the first beat and everybody remembers this to set your metronome to a meter have to fall before you start to practice. You also will have noticed that we now have two lines of music showing two separate guitar parts. The top guitar part shows the melody. While the bottom line shows the chords. These two guitar parts would obviously be running simultaneously. While it was probably unnecessary to notate the second guitar part, since we already have the chord symbols written above the music, I did it this way to show that you can have as many parts as you like on the stave, depending on how many instruments you want to notate.
When you're looking at sheet music in the real world, you'll often see multiple parts notated. Now notice that there's no lead and by this time, we just launch straight into the song. As before, we're in the key of C and we'll be using the C major scale to play the melody. The time signature is two four as we've discussed, and the tempo is 80 beats per minute. The first seven bars are made up mostly of straight eighth notes. Then when it gets to the ninth bar, we start to see some dotted eighth notes.
So watch out for those. lowest note of the melody is the note E found in the 12th bar, which can be played on the D string second fret. The highest note of the melody is the note F, found in the sixth bar, which can be played on the high E strings first. The last thing I want to draw your attention to is the two dots right at the end of the last bar. This is known as a repeat sign, or a repeat bar line. And it indicates that when you reach the end of the bar, you should repeat the whole song from the beginning.
Repeat sounds are really handy since they save us from writing out reams and reams of music notation. With that said, let's look at how to play it on your fretboard. Remember that the counts involved will only be two beats this time.