Green Day
Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) chords
Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Green Day is a beginner song in Ab, played with a capo on fret 1. The whole sheet is 4 chords (G, C, D, Em) across 4 sections: Intro → Verse → Chorus → Outro. Every shape is an open chord, so nothing here needs barre strength. It sits at roughly 94 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: C → D, 6 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerno barre needed
- Key
- Abwith a capo on fret 1
- Tempo
- 94BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 4all open shapes
- Sections
- 4each with its own progression
Chords in Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)
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 →
Intro♩=94
Verse♩=94
Chorus♩=94
Outro♩=94
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)
Good Riddance is the graduation song every guitarist gets asked for, and the whole thing sits under four open shapes: G, C, D and Em. Capo on fret 1 puts you in Ab, so the shapes stay easy while the pitch matches the record. The hook is the intro, which walks down Em, D, C, G — a descending movement where three of the four chords are one finger apart. Keep the ring finger glued to the D string as you leave G, because it stays there for Em and C.
The real difficulty is not the chords, it is the right hand. The record is fingerpicked, but a soft down-down-up pattern on the low three strings sounds close enough at a campfire and is far easier to sing over. Pick the bass note of each chord first and let the top strings ring through the change; muting them early is what makes this song sound choppy.
Practise at 70 BPM and loop only the first four bars of the intro until the Em-to-D-to-C descent is automatic, then bolt on the chorus. Play the final G and let it ring for a full bar before you lift your hand. Speed is the last step here, not the first — this tune gets worse, not better, when rushed. Record thirty seconds of yourself once a week; the fingerpicking evens out far faster when you can hear the uneven notes instead of only feeling them.
How to practise Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)
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
G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → Em (0-2-2-0-0-0, beginner)
4 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so nothing here needs barre strength yet.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
C → D6×G → C6×C → G3×D → C3×
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
- Gevery section
- Cevery section
- Devery section
- EmIntro, Chorus
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 56 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 56 → 71 → 85 → 94 BPM. The recorded feel is around 94 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 85 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 Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) with a capo
This sheet is written with a capo on fret 1. 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 capo
Ab C# Eb Fm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 1as written
G C D Em
4 of 4 stay open
Fret 2
F# B C# Ebm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 3
F Bb C Dm
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 4
E A B C#m
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 5
Eb Ab Bb Cm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 6
D G A Bm
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 7
C# F# Ab Bbm
no open shapes left, all barre
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) 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, Let It Be, Creep, Hallelujah.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) 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.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
113bars of this chord across the songbook
30songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 27×.