Iris chords

How to play Iris

Iris is the 90s ballad most guitarists learn badly, and the reason is a tuning. On the record the guitars are set to a drone — five strings brought to D, the low string dropped to B — which is why the intro rings like it was struck rather than strummed. The upper strings sustain the note D, rather than a complete D major chord, underneath every change. You do not need it. In standard tuning with no capo the whole chart is in D, and that is the version printed above.

The verse is a six-chord cycle — D, Em7, G, Bm, Asus4, G — and the chorus throws three of them away and walks down Bm, A, G. That descent is the engine. Each chord drops a whole step on the neck, so the harmony slides downhill while the melody stays high, and the tension you feel in the chorus comes from those two directions pulling apart. The instrumental break then runs G–F#m–G–Bm, which is the intro re-harmonised rather than a new section.

Those two colour chords are doing more than decorating. Em7 adds the note D to E minor, and Asus4 swaps A’s C♯ for that same D, so both shapes keep the tonic of the key ringing while the bass moves underneath them. That is the closest standard tuning gets to the record’s drone, and it is why the tabbed versions that print plain Em and A sound thinner than the album.

The obstacle is Bm at the 2nd fret. The root-position barre is x-2-4-4-3-2. If your barre is not clean yet, play the shell x-2-4-4-3-x instead: root, fifth, octave and the minor third, which is every note the chord actually needs. Save the full shape for the chorus, where the song demands volume.

Rhythm is where most players oversell it. Arpeggiate the verse — bass note on beat one, then the upper strings in slow pairs — and only open into full downstrokes when the chorus arrives. This accompaniment uses 6/8: count six eighth notes in two groups of three, with the main pulses on counts 1 and 4. Set a metronome that counts dotted-quarter pulses to about 51 BPM; the chart’s quarter-note display of 77 describes approximately the same speed. Two of this site’s other 90s charts ask for the same dynamic control, Creep and Wonderwall, and both are good warm-ups for it. If you want the ringing version and are willing to retune, start by checking your string gauges — pulling the low string down to B slackens it a lot, and pushing the B string up to D is how people break one mid-song.

The key, meter and tempo reference is the licensed guitar arrangement published by Hal Leonard on Musicnotes. The chart here is a simplified standard-tuning accompaniment, not a note-for-note transcription of the recording.