The Beatles
Hey Jude chords
Hey Jude by The Beatles is an intermediate song in F, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 7 chords (F, C, C7, Bb, F7, Gm7, Eb) across 3 sections: Verse → Bridge → Outro (na-na-na) ×6. 2 of the 7 shapes are open chords and Bb is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 74 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Eb → Bb, once.
- Difficulty
- Intermediatebarre shape Bb
- Key
- Fwith no capo
- Tempo
- 74BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 72 open, 5 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Hey Jude
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♩=74
Bridge♩=74
Outro (na-na-na)× 6 · ♩=74
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Hey Jude
Hey Jude is the song every beginner should graduate to when they want their first “grown-up” key. It lives in F major, which forces you to meet the F barre chord head-on — but the tempo is slow, the changes are predictable, and the four-chord outro will win you any room.
The verse walks from F down through C and C7 before climbing back up through Bb, and the bridge borrows F7 and Gm7 for a gospel lift. The outro — F, Eb, Bb, F — is one of the most famous loops in pop: once you can change between those four chords cleanly, you can play it for ten minutes straight.
Cheat sheet: if the full F barre is still a struggle, play the mini-barre version (x-x-3-2-1-1) and mute the low E with your thumb. Strum lightly and let the melody singers do the heavy lifting.
How to practise Hey Jude
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) → C7 (x-3-2-3-1-0, beginner) → F (1-3-3-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre) → F7 (1-3-1-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre) → Gm7 (3-5-3-3-3-3, intermediate, needs a barre) → Bb (x-1-3-3-3-1, intermediate, needs a barre) → Eb (x-6-8-8-8-6, intermediate, needs a barre)
2 of the 7 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave Bb until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
C7 → F3×Bb → F2×Bb → Gm71×C → C71×
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
- Fevery section
- CVerse
- C7Verse, Bridge
- Bbevery section
- F7Bridge
- Gm7Bridge
- EbOutro (na-na-na)
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 44 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 44 → 56 → 67 → 74 BPM. The recorded feel is around 74 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 67 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 Hey Jude 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
F C C7 Bb F7 Gm7 Eb
2 of 7 stay open
Fret 1
E B B7 A E7 F#m7 D
5 of 7 stay open
Fret 2
Eb Bb Bb7 Ab Eb7 Fm7 C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 3
D A A7 G D7 Em7 C
7 of 7 stay open
Fret 4
C# Ab Ab7 F# C#7 Ebm7 B
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 5
C G G7 F C7 Dm7 Bb
4 of 7 stay open
Fret 6
B F# F#7 E B7 C#m7 A
3 of 7 stay open
Fret 7
Bb F F7 Eb Bb7 Cm7 Ab
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 Hey Jude 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, Wish You Were Here, The Weight, Blackbird.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Hey Jude 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.
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×.
9bars of this chord across the songbook
5songs use this shape
Most often followed by F, 6×.
3bars of this chord across the songbook
1songs use this shape
Most often followed by F, 2×.
5bars of this chord across the songbook
2songs use this shape
Most often followed by Bbmaj7, 4×.
13bars of this chord across the songbook
4songs use this shape
Most often followed by A7, 1×.
1bars of this chord across the songbook
1songs use this shape
Most often followed by Bb, 1×.