James Blunt
You're Beautiful chords
You're Beautiful by James Blunt is an intermediate song in Eb, played with a capo on fret 3. The whole sheet is 5 chords (C, G, Am, F, Dm) across 4 sections: Intro → Verse → Chorus → Bridge. 4 of the 5 shapes are open chords. Shapes that use a barre: F. It sits at roughly 82 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Am → F, 7 times.
- Difficulty
- Intermediatebarre shape F
- Key
- Ebwith a capo on fret 3
- Tempo
- 82BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 54 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 4each with its own progression
Chords in You're Beautiful
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 · ♩=82
Verse4/4 · ♩=82
Chorus4/4 · ♩=82
Bridge4/4 · ♩=82
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play You're Beautiful
You’re Beautiful is the classic capo study: capo on fret 3 and the song in Eb becomes plain C, G, Am and F, four shapes you already own. Everything hangs off the C to G move, where three fingers travel together down one string set. Keep your middle finger planted on the low E string at fret 3 as you leave C — it is the same note that G needs — and you cut the change down to two moving fingers.
The verse is one four-chord loop with no variation, so treat it as a breathing exercise - play it as arpeggios rather than strums, thumb on the bass note, and let the top two strings ring through the change into F. That F is the only genuine obstacle, and the four-string version without the barre is perfectly acceptable here because the arpeggio never asks for the low root.
Learn to feel the difference between the verse and chorus instead of playing both exactly the same. Work at 70 BPM with a metronome, looping C to G to Am for a minute each pair, then run the whole verse. Slow, quiet arpeggios teach changes faster than loud strumming, and this song punishes any change that clicks or stalls. When C to G is silent, spend five minutes on F and Dm, since those two are the only places where your hand has to travel any distance.
How to practise You're Beautiful
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
C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → Am (x-0-2-2-1-0, beginner) → Dm (x-x-0-2-3-1, beginner) → F (1-3-3-2-1-1, intermediate, needs a barre)
4 of the 5 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave F until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
Am → F7×C → G6×G → Am5×F → C4×
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
- Cevery section
- Gevery section
- Amevery section
- Fevery section
- Dm
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 49 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 49 → 62 → 74 → 82 BPM. The tempo marked on this sheet is 82 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 74 for longer than feels necessary.
Practise each section's chord changes slowly, then play the sheet through at a steady tempo without pausing between sections.
Playing You're Beautiful with a capo
This sheet is written with a capo on fret 3. 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
Eb Bb Cm Ab Fm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 1
D A Bm G Em
4 of 5 stay open
Fret 2
C# Ab Bbm F# Ebm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 3as written
C G Am F Dm
4 of 5 stay open
Fret 4
B F# Abm E C#m
1 of 5 stay open
Fret 5
Bb F Gm Eb Cm
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 6
A E F#m D Bm
3 of 5 stay open
Fret 7
Ab Eb Fm C# Bbm
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 You're Beautiful clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More intermediate songs to learn after this one: Father and Son, Shallow, The One That Got Away, Landslide.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in You're Beautiful 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.
420bars of this chord across the songbook
70songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
509bars of this chord across the songbook
77songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 89×.
125bars of this chord across the songbook
35songs use this shape
Most often followed by F, 23×.
114bars of this chord across the songbook
29songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 38×.
23bars of this chord across the songbook
9songs use this shape
Most often followed by F, 5×.