Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Teach Your Children chords
Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young is a beginner song in D, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 4 chords (D, G, A, Bm) across 3 sections: Intro → Verse ×2 → Chorus. 3 of the 4 shapes are open chords. Shapes that use a barre: Bm. It sits at roughly 76 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Bm → G, once.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerbarre shape Bm
- Key
- Dwith no capo
- Tempo
- 76BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 43 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Teach Your Children
Frets read low E to high E, x means leave that string out.
Chord sheet
One chord per bar in this practice sheet. Follow the time signature shown beside each section; dots mark the remaining counts in the bar. Tap a bar to hear its chord, or loop the section to practise the changes.
Chord accompaniment only. Follow the section notes for this arrangement’s timing. Songs whose words are public domain →
Intro4/4 · ♩=76
Verse× 2 · 4/4 · ♩=76
Chorus4/4 · ♩=76
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Teach Your Children
Four chords, one of them a barre, and a pedal-steel melody that makes the whole thing sound far more complicated than it is. The verse is a two-bar loop of D – G – D – A, repeated for as long as the stanza lasts, so the right hand does all the work: a relaxed four-four strum with a small accent on beat two. This is a song where playing softly is the technique. If you dig in, the changes start to clatter and you lose the gentle, ringing quality the record has.
D and Bm share D on the B string at fret 3. In the D diagram that note uses the ring finger; in Bm it uses the middle finger. You can refinger D to prepare the Bm change, or change fingers on the shared note. Add the fret-2 barre and the D and G strings at fret 4, keeping the low E silent. Returning to D also releases those fret-4 notes, so it takes more than lifting the barre alone.
Work at 60 BPM with two bars per chord change and loop D – G – D – A until the chord changes stop being events. Then add the chorus and practise only the last three chords, Bm – G – A – D, twenty times in a row; that descent is where beginners lose the beat. Finally, try the Asus4 shape in place of the plain A in the verses for the suspended, open sound, and play the intro twice as an instrumental before you start singing.
How to practise Teach Your Children
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 speed marked here.
Learn the shapes easiest first
D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → A (x-0-2-2-2-0, beginner) → Bm (x-2-4-4-3-2, intermediate, needs a barre)
3 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave Bm until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
D → G6×G → D5×D → A4×G → A2×
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
- Aevery section
- BmChorus
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 46 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 46 → 57 → 68 → 76 BPM. The tempo marked on this sheet is 76 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 68 for longer than feels necessary.
The section to leave until last is Chorus (12 bars in this sheet).
Playing Teach Your Children 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
D G A Bm
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 1
C# F# Ab Bbm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2
C F G Am
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 3
B E F# Abm
1 of 4 stay open
Fret 4
Bb Eb F Gm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 5
A D E F#m
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 6
Ab C# Eb Fm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
G C D Em
4 of 4 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 Teach Your Children clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More beginner songs to learn after this one: Sweater Weather, Payphone, The Scientist, 505.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Teach Your Children turns up across all 104 songs on this site, and what it most often moves to next. The counts come from the sheet library itself, not from theory.
323bars of this chord across the songbook
58songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 52×.
509bars of this chord across the songbook
77songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 89×.
134bars of this chord across the songbook
24songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 19×.
84bars of this chord across the songbook
17songs use this shape
Most often followed by A, 13×.