Bill Withers
Ain't No Sunshine chords
Ain't No Sunshine by Bill Withers is a beginner song in Am, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 6 chords (Am, Em, G, Dm, Am/G, Bm7) across 3 sections: Verse ×2 → Chorus → Turnaround (last two bars). Every shape is an open chord, so nothing here needs barre strength. It sits at roughly 78 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Em → Dm, 3 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerno barre needed
- Key
- Amwith no capo
- Tempo
- 78BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 6all open shapes
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Ain't No Sunshine
Frets read low E to high E, x means leave that string out.
Chord sheet
One chord per bar, four beats to the bar: the shape lands on beat one and the dots mark the beats after it, so you can see where the change falls without any lyrics. Where a section has no strumming pattern written, play one chord per bar. Tap a bar to hear it.
Lyrics are not reproduced for this song: they are still in copyright and this site has no licence to publish them. The chords, structure, strumming and sing-along timing are all here. Songs whose words are public domain →
Verse× 2 · ♩=78
Chorus♩=78
Turnaround (last two bars)♩=78
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Ain't No Sunshine
Ain’t No Sunshine is three open chords doing an enormous amount of work: Am, Em and G repeat one bar each, over and over, and the song is entirely carried by that circle and by the space between the chords. Dm turns up as the turnaround that leads back to the top of the loop, which gives your ear the one moment of movement in an otherwise static form. Two small variations are worth having: the bass line can walk down through Am/G on the way to Em, and the turnaround can run through Bm7 before the Dm, which is what stops the repeat sounding like a loop and starts it sounding like a song.
Because the harmony is so still, everything depends on space. Fret each chord and then let it ring for the full bar instead of strumming through it — the record is mostly guitar, bass and a very patient singer. Play four soft downstrokes per bar, mute the strings with your fretting hand whenever the vocal comes in, and resist filling the gaps. Am to Em is the only change that needs work: keep your ring finger on the B string at fret 3 for both shapes.
Set the metronome to 60 and play the loop with one chord per bar, counting aloud. When that feels comfortable, add the Em, Dm turnaround and play it four times in a row, listening for the bass note on each change rather than for the chord itself. Push toward 78 only once the silences are as deliberate as the strums, and try playing the whole loop with your thumb instead of a pick: this song sounds better soft, and a pick makes it sound like a different record.
How to practise Ain't No Sunshine
Four steps computed from this sheet: the order the shapes are easiest to learn in, the changes that really occur in the progressions above, where each chord turns up, and the tempo ladder up to the recorded speed.
Learn the shapes easiest first
Am (x-0-2-2-1-0, beginner) → Em (0-2-2-0-0-0, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → Dm (x-x-0-2-3-1, beginner) → Am/G (3-0-2-2-1-0, beginner) → Bm7 (x-2-0-2-0-2, beginner)
6 of the 6 shapes are open chords, so nothing here needs barre strength yet.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
Em → Dm3×Am → Am/G1×Am → Bm71×Am → Em1×
These counts come from the progressions on this page, so they are the changes you will actually play, not a generic list of pairs to practise.
Know where each chord turns up
- Amevery section
- Emevery section
- GVerse
- DmChorus, Turnaround (last two bars)
- Am/GChorus
- Bm7Chorus
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 47 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 47 → 59 → 70 → 78 BPM. The recorded feel is around 78 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 70 for longer than feels necessary.
Every section here uses the same set of shapes, so there is no section to single out. Whatever you can play once, you can play all the way through.
Playing Ain't No Sunshine with a capo
This sheet needs no capo. Each card shows what you would finger at that capo position so the song still sounds exactly as written. Useful when the shapes above are awkward, or when you want to sing it higher without learning new chords.
No capoas written
Am Em G Dm Am/G Bm7
6 of 6 stay open
Fret 1
Abm Ebm F# C#m Abm* Bbm7
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2
Gm Dm F Cm Gm* Am7
2 of 6 stay open
Fret 3
F#m C#m E Bm F#m* Abm7
1 of 6 stay open
Fret 4
Fm Cm Eb Bbm Fm* Gm7
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 5
Em Bm D Am Em* F#m7
4 of 6 stay open
Fret 6
Ebm Bbm C# Abm Ebm* Fm7
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
Dm Am C Gm Dm* Em7
5 of 6 stay open
* this position has no separate fingering for a bass-note inversion in our chord library, so the parent chord is shown. Play that shape and the inversion note is an optional bass addition.
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Ain't No Sunshine clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More beginner songs to learn after this one: Wonderwall, Creep, Hallelujah, Oh! Susanna.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Ain't No Sunshine turns up across all 80 songs on this site, and what it most often moves to next. The counts come from the sheet library itself, not from theory.
116bars of this chord across the songbook
26songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 27×.
113bars of this chord across the songbook
30songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 27×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
16bars of this chord across the songbook
6songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 4×.
4bars of this chord across the songbook
2songs use this shape
Most often followed by F, 3×.
1bars of this chord across the songbook
1songs use this shape
Most often followed by Em, 1×.