Luiz Bonfa
Black Orpheus chords
Black Orpheus by Luiz Bonfa is an advanced song in Dm, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 7 chords (Dm7, Dm7b5, Cm9, Gm7, A7, Bb7, Fmaj7) across 3 sections: A1 → A2 → B. 1 of the 7 shapes is an open chord and Dm7b5 is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 132 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Dm7 → Dm7b5, once.
- Difficulty
- Advancedbarre shape Dm7b5
- Key
- Dmwith no capo
- Tempo
- 132BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 71 open, 6 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Black Orpheus
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 →
A1♩=132
A2♩=132
B♩=132
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Black Orpheus
This is a bossa nova, so the right hand comes first: thumb plays the bass note on beat one and beat three, and the fingers pluck the chord on the offbeats, softly, with no accent. Everything in this song is a two-bar unit, and the harmony moves on beat one. Count the bars out loud while you practise, because the melody line is so smooth that guitarists drift half a bar out and never notice until the tune stops matching.
The A section opens by sliding one shape: Dm7 at the 5th fret becomes Dm7b5 when you move a single finger, and then becomes Gm7 as you shift the whole grip up three frets and change the top note. Learn that as one movement rather than three chords. Dm7b5 is the half-diminished pivot that turns the phrase towards Gm7, and it lasts only two beats, so if it sounds clumsy you are holding it too long rather than fingering it wrong.
Cm9 is the surprise in this tune and it is worth learning properly: play a Cm7 shape on the middle four strings and add the ninth on the top string, or use the movable Cm9 at the 3rd fret. It leans into Fmaj7, the relative major, which is the brighter half of the A section. Practise Cm9 to Fmaj7 and back until the change stops sounding like a mistake, because the ear wants a dominant chord there and the ninth is what makes the phrase sound Brazilian instead of ordinary.
Set the metronome to 100 with the click on beats two and four and loop the first eight bars for five minutes, playing only bass note and chord. Then add the B section, where Fmaj7 to Bb7 to A7 is the same cadence you already know from the tune’s first half. Aim for a steady, quiet groove rather than speed: this music falls apart at 140 and settles beautifully at 110.
How to practise Black Orpheus
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
A7 (x-0-2-0-2-0, beginner) → Dm7 (x-x-0-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre) → Cm9 (x-3-5-3-3-3, intermediate, needs a barre) → Gm7 (3-5-3-3-3-3, intermediate, needs a barre) → Bb7 (x-1-3-1-3-1, intermediate, needs a barre) → Fmaj7 (1-3-2-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre) → Dm7b5 (x-x-0-1-1-1, advanced, needs a barre)
1 of the 7 shapes is an open chord, so start there and leave Dm7b5 until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
A7 → Dm73×Bb7 → A73×Fmaj7 → Bb73×Cm9 → Fmaj72×
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
- Dm7every section
- Dm7b5A1
- Cm9A2, B
- Gm7A1, B
- A7every section
- Bb7every section
- Fmaj7A2, B
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 79 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 79 → 99 → 119 → 132 BPM. The recorded feel is around 132 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 119 for longer than feels necessary.
The section to leave until last is A1 (8 bars in this sheet).
Playing Black Orpheus with a capo
This sheet needs no capo. At every other capo position, at least one of these chords would need a fingering our chord library does not carry, so a full chart would be incomplete. We would rather show nothing than a row with a gap in it. Play it as written, or use the transpose buttons in the toolbar above to move the song into a key whose shapes you already know.
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Black Orpheus clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More advanced songs to learn after this one: While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Wonderwall, Hotel California, Hey Jude.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Black Orpheus 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.
29bars of this chord across the songbook
6songs use this shape
Most often followed by G7, 13×.
6bars of this chord across the songbook
2songs use this shape
Most often followed by Cm, 1×.
7bars of this chord across the songbook
2songs use this shape
Most often followed by Dm7b5, 3×.
13bars of this chord across the songbook
4songs use this shape
Most often followed by A7, 1×.
47bars of this chord across the songbook
14songs use this shape
Most often followed by Dm7, 10×.
10bars of this chord across the songbook
3songs use this shape
Most often followed by A7, 3×.
8bars of this chord across the songbook
3songs use this shape
Most often followed by Bb7, 3×.