Creedence Clearwater Revival
Have You Ever Seen the Rain chords
Have You Ever Seen the Rain by Creedence Clearwater Revival is a beginner song in C, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 4 chords (C, G, Am, F) across 3 sections: Intro → Verse ×2 → Chorus. 3 of the 4 shapes are open chords. Shapes that use a barre: F. It sits at roughly 116 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: F → G, 3 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerbarre shape F
- Key
- Cwith no capo
- Tempo
- 116BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 43 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Have You Ever Seen the Rain
Frets read low E to high E, x means leave that string out.
Chord sheet
One chord per bar in this practice sheet. Follow the time signature shown beside each section; dots mark the remaining counts in the bar. Tap a bar to hear its chord, or loop the section to practise the changes.
Chord accompaniment only. Follow the section notes for this arrangement’s timing. Songs whose words are public domain →
Intro4/4 · ♩=116
Verse× 2 · 4/4 · ♩=116
Chorus4/4 · ♩=116
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Have You Ever Seen the Rain
Four chords, and one of them is F, which is the only real obstacle in the song. The trick is the shape of the tune: the verses sit almost entirely on C with a single push to G, so the verse is more about groove than about chord changes. All the movement happens in the chorus, where F and G shove the song up and C and Am bring it back down. Play the verse lightly and the chorus with a fuller strum and you get the dynamic lift the record has without changing anything else.
For the F chord, use the small three-finger version on the top four strings (xx3211) rather than the full barre. It rings cleanly, it moves quickly to and from C, and in this song nobody will miss the low root note, because the bass is playing it anyway. The Am to F change in the intro is the one to isolate: your index finger stays on the B string at fret 1 for both chords, so only two fingers have to move. If you want the record’s bass line, walk the A string down from C to B before landing on Am.
Practise at 90 BPM with straight downstrokes and let every chord ring for its full bar; this is a song that sounds wrong when it is choppy. Loop the chorus until F arrives on time, because a late F is the classic mistake here. When it is clean, take it up to 116 and try the intro as an instrumental, ending on a single held C and counting two bars of silence before you start singing.
How to practise Have You Ever Seen the Rain
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 speed marked here.
Learn the shapes easiest first
C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → Am (x-0-2-2-1-0, beginner) → F (1-3-3-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre)
3 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave F until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
G → C4×F → G3×C → Am2×C → G2×
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
- Gevery section
- AmIntro, Chorus
- FIntro, Chorus
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 70 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 70 → 87 → 104 → 116 BPM. The tempo marked on this sheet is 116 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 104 for longer than feels necessary.
Practise each section's chord changes slowly, then play the sheet through at a steady tempo without pausing between sections.
Playing Have You Ever Seen the Rain 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 G Am F
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 1
B F# Abm E
1 of 4 stay open
Fret 2
Bb F Gm Eb
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 3
A E F#m D
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 4
Ab Eb Fm C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 5
G D Em C
4 of 4 stay open
Fret 6
F# C# Ebm B
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
F C Dm Bb
2 of 4 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 Have You Ever Seen the Rain clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More beginner songs to learn after this one: Sweater Weather, Payphone, The Scientist, 505.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Have You Ever Seen the Rain turns up across all 104 songs on this site, and what it most often moves to next. The counts come from the sheet library itself, not from theory.
420bars of this chord across the songbook
70songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
509bars of this chord across the songbook
77songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 89×.
125bars of this chord across the songbook
35songs use this shape
Most often followed by F, 23×.
114bars of this chord across the songbook
29songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 38×.