Elvis Presley
Can't Help Falling in Love chords
Can't Help Falling in Love by Elvis Presley is a beginner song in C, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 5 chords (C, Em, Am, F, G) across 2 sections: Verse → Instrumental (repeat verse). 4 of the 5 shapes are open chords and F is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 77 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Am → F, 4 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerbarre shape F
- Key
- Cwith no capo
- Tempo
- 77BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 54 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 2each with its own progression
Chords in Can't Help Falling in Love
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♩=77
Instrumental (repeat verse)♩=77
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Can't Help Falling in Love
Can’t Help Falling in Love is the waltz every guitarist should own: five open chords, a 6/8 lilt, and a descending melody that makes even a simple strum sound romantic.
The verse walks C → Em → Am → F — one finger moving at a time — then the turnaround line (“take my hand”) opens with C, G, Am before the F-C-G-C close. It’s the perfect song for practising smooth, connected chord changes because the tempo never pushes you.
Count in six, strum “bass, strum, strum” per bar, and let the top strings ring through the changes. Fingerpickers can arpeggiate the same shapes for an even closer match to the record. For a lower key that suits more voices, capo down isn’t possible — transpose to G (G, Bm, Em, C, D) instead.
How to practise Can't Help Falling in Love
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
C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → Em (0-2-2-0-0-0, beginner) → Am (x-0-2-2-1-0, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → F (1-3-3-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre)
4 of the 5 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave F until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
C → G6×Am → F4×F → C4×C → Em2×
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
- Cevery section
- Emevery section
- Amevery section
- Fevery section
- Gevery section
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 46 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 46 → 58 → 69 → 77 BPM. The recorded feel is around 77 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 69 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 Can't Help Falling in Love 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
C Em Am F G
4 of 5 stay open
Fret 1
B Ebm Abm E F#
1 of 5 stay open
Fret 2
Bb Dm Gm Eb F
1 of 5 stay open
Fret 3
A C#m F#m D E
3 of 5 stay open
Fret 4
Ab Cm Fm C# Eb
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 5
G Bm Em C D
4 of 5 stay open
Fret 6
F# Bbm Ebm B C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
F Am Dm Bb C
3 of 5 stay open
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Can't Help Falling in Love 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, Oh! Susanna, When the Saints Go Marching In.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Can't Help Falling in Love 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.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
113bars of this chord across the songbook
30songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 27×.
116bars of this chord across the songbook
26songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 27×.
106bars of this chord across the songbook
24songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 31×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.