The Beach Boys
Sloop John B chords
Sloop John B by The Beach Boys is a beginner song in Ab, played with a capo on fret 1. The whole sheet is 5 chords (G, D, G7, C, Am) across 2 sections: Verse → Chorus. Every shape is an open chord, so nothing here needs barre strength.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: G → D, 5 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerno barre needed
- Key
- Abwith a capo on fret 1
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 5all open shapes
- Sections
- 2each with its own progression
Chords in Sloop John B
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♩=90
Chorus♩=90
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Sloop John B
Capo on fret 1 puts this in Ab and gives you five friendly shapes: G, D, G7, C and Am. The verse and the chorus are built from the same four-bar loop, so you learn one pattern and use it twice — the difference between the two sections is mostly in how you sing them, not in what your left hand does. The G7 is the engine of the whole thing: it appears at the end of the first half of every loop and shoves the music towards C, which is what stops the song from sounding like a nursery rhyme.
The Am is the chord worth isolating, because it arrives on the second half of a bar and beginners tend to rush it. From C to Am, keep your index finger on the B string at fret 1 — it belongs to both chords — and move the middle and ring fingers over one string each. G7 is even easier: from G, lift the ring finger off the top E string. Practise the whole loop with a gentle calypso strum, accenting beats two and four, and keep the right hand moving even when you are changing chords, since a gap in the strum is far more noticeable here than a muffled note.
Work at 90 BPM with four beats per chord and loop the verse for ten minutes, listening for the G7 to land exactly on the beat. Then play the chorus straight after it without pausing; the two sections share their changes, so the join should be invisible. When it is comfortable, take it up towards the record’s brisk tempo and try singing the melody over it, because this is a song where the vocal is the part everyone remembers, not the guitar part.
How to practise Sloop John B
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
G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → G7 (3-2-0-0-0-1, beginner) → C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → Am (x-0-2-2-1-0, beginner)
5 of the 5 shapes are open chords, so nothing here needs barre strength yet.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
G → D5×D → G3×Am → G2×C → Am2×
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
- Gevery section
- Devery section
- G7every section
- Cevery section
- Amevery section
Climb the tempo ladder
This sheet does not list a tempo, so pick one where every change is clean and use the metronome to move up in 4 BPM steps.
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 Sloop John B with a capo
This sheet is written with a capo on fret 1. 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
Ab Eb Ab7 C# Bbm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 1as written
G D G7 C Am
5 of 5 stay open
Fret 2
F# C# F#7 B Abm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 3
F C F7 Bb Gm
1 of 5 stay open
Fret 4
E B E7 A F#m
3 of 5 stay open
Fret 5
Eb Bb Eb7 Ab Fm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 6
D A D7 G Em
5 of 5 stay open
Fret 7
C# Ab C#7 F# Ebm
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 Sloop John B 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, Hallelujah.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Sloop John B 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.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
33bars of this chord across the songbook
13songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 11×.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
116bars of this chord across the songbook
26songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 27×.