The Beatles
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) chords
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) by The Beatles is an intermediate song in E, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 7 chords (E, Eadd9, Fadd9, D, Em, A, B7) across 4 sections: Intro → Verse → Bridge → Outro. Every shape is an open chord, so nothing here needs barre strength. It sits at roughly 176 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: E → Eadd9, 6 times.
- Difficulty
- Intermediateno barre needed
- Key
- Ewith no capo
- Tempo
- 176BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 7all open shapes
- Sections
- 4each with its own progression
Chords in Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
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♩=176
Verse♩=176
Bridge♩=176
Outro♩=176
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
The two chords everybody asks about here are Eadd9 and Fadd9, and both are the same E shape with one finger added and then slid. Play E with the middle, ring and index fingers on the A, D and G strings; Eadd9 is that shape with the little finger dropped onto the B string at the 2nd fret, which adds the ninth. Fadd9 is the same hand moved up one fret. Keep the ring and middle fingers planted through both changes and only the index finger and little finger do any work.
The record is in 12/8 and the guitar plays a rolling picking pattern, not strums. Thumb takes the low E on every beat, then the fingers walk the top three strings in a repeating pattern, so what you hear is a steady pendulum underneath. Loop the two-bar Intro at a slow 70 and count six even notes per bar. If your thumb hesitates, the whole figure collapses, so practise the thumb alone first with the fretting hand muting the strings.
The Verse move that trips people up is the D on the last beat of each line. It arrives early and lasts one beat only, so your little finger has to leave the B string and the hand has to shift down two frets and back inside a single beat. Practise E to D and back in isolation, twenty times, without strumming, until the shift is automatic. Only then add the picking, and only then the Fadd9 slide.
For the Bridge, Em and A are both open shapes, so the whole four bars is one finger moving on the G string: hold it as a drone and let the bass walk. The bridge closes on B7, which is the one chord in the song that is not open and not E — play it with the ring finger on the A string at the 2nd fret and the middle finger on the D string at the 1st, and let the open high E ring. B7 pulls back to Em hard, so put it on the last beat and resist holding it longer. Set the metronome to 60 and play Intro, Verse and Bridge as one continuous run for five minutes, standing up, with the chords ringing through each other. Speed is the last thing to add: this song sounds wrong fast before it sounds wrong sloppy.
How to practise Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
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
E (0-2-2-1-0-0, beginner) → Eadd9 (0-2-2-1-0-2, beginner) → Fadd9 (x-x-3-2-1-3, beginner) → D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → Em (0-2-2-0-0-0, beginner) → A (x-0-2-2-2-0, beginner) → B7 (x-2-1-2-0-2, beginner)
7 of the 7 shapes are open chords, so nothing here needs barre strength yet.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
E → Eadd96×E → D3×Eadd9 → E3×Eadd9 → Fadd93×
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
- EIntro, Verse, Outro
- Eadd9Intro, Verse, Outro
- Fadd9Intro, Outro
- DVerse
- EmBridge, Outro
- ABridge, Outro
- B7Outro
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 106 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 106 → 132 → 158 → 176 BPM. The recorded feel is around 176 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 158 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 Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) with a capo
This sheet needs no capo. At every other capo position, at least one of these chords would need a fingering our chord library does not carry, so a full chart would be incomplete. We would rather show nothing than a row with a gap in it. Play it as written, or use the transpose buttons in the toolbar above to move the song into a key whose shapes you already know.
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More intermediate songs to learn after this one: Hey Jude, Wish You Were Here, The Weight, Blackbird.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) 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.
64bars of this chord across the songbook
9songs use this shape
Most often followed by Eadd9, 6×.
6bars of this chord across the songbook
1songs use this shape
Most often followed by E, 3×.
4bars of this chord across the songbook
2songs use this shape
Most often followed by E, 3×.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
113bars of this chord across the songbook
30songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 27×.
120bars of this chord across the songbook
20songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 24×.
10bars of this chord across the songbook
5songs use this shape
Most often followed by E, 3×.