The Beatles
Here Comes the Sun chords
Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles is an intermediate song in A, played with a capo on fret 7. The whole sheet is 5 chords (D, G, A7, F, C) across 3 sections: Verse → Bridge → Verse (repeat). 4 of the 5 shapes are open chords and F is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 129 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: F → C, 2 times.
- Difficulty
- Intermediatebarre shape F
- Key
- Awith a capo on fret 7
- Tempo
- 129BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 54 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Here Comes the Sun
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♩=129
Bridge♩=129
Verse (repeat)♩=129
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Here Comes the Sun
Here Comes the Sun is George Harrison’s masterpiece of time-signature tricks, but the chord shapes stay simple once you accept the capo: place it on fret 7 and the whole song lives in D, G and A7.
The signature riff is played over D and G — alternating the bass note with a picked melody on the top strings — and the A7 turns it back around. The bridge walks F → C → G → D, the one stretch of the song that feels like a workout, before the A7 hammer-on phrase drops you back into the verse.
Count carefully: the verse is in a rolling 11/8 feel, so let your strumming follow the melody’s natural bounce rather than a strict grid. It clicks after a few reps, and it’s one of the most satisfying acoustic parts ever written.
How to practise Here Comes the Sun
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
D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → A7 (x-0-2-0-2-0, beginner) → C (x-3-2-0-1-0, 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
D → G4×G → A74×A7 → D2×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
- Devery section
- Gevery section
- A7every section
- FBridge
- CBridge
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 77 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 77 → 97 → 116 → 129 BPM. The recorded feel is around 129 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 116 for longer than feels necessary.
The section to leave until last is Bridge (12 bars in this sheet).
Playing Here Comes the Sun with a capo
This sheet is written with a capo on fret 7. 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
A D E7 C G
5 of 5 stay open
Fret 1
Ab C# Eb7 B F#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2
G C D7 Bb F
3 of 5 stay open
Fret 3
F# B C#7 A E
2 of 5 stay open
Fret 4
F Bb C7 Ab Eb
1 of 5 stay open
Fret 5
E A B7 G D
5 of 5 stay open
Fret 6
Eb Ab Bb7 F# C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7as written
D G A7 F C
4 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 Here Comes the Sun clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More intermediate songs to learn after this one: Hotel California, Hey Jude, Wish You Were Here, The Weight.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Here Comes the Sun 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.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
47bars of this chord across the songbook
14songs use this shape
Most often followed by Dm7, 10×.
106bars of this chord across the songbook
24songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 31×.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.