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 and F is the one that needs a barre. 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, 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♩=116
Verse× 2 · ♩=116
Chorus♩=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 recorded speed.
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 recorded feel is around 116 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 104 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 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: Wonderwall, Let It Be, Creep, Oh! Susanna.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Have You Ever Seen the Rain 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×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
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×.