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 and F is the one that needs a barre. 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, 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♩=82
Verse♩=82
Chorus♩=82
Bridge♩=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 recorded speed.
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 recorded feel is around 82 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 74 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 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: Hotel California, Hey Jude, Wish You Were Here, The Weight.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in You're Beautiful 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.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
116bars of this chord across the songbook
26songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 27×.
106bars of this chord across the songbook
24songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 31×.
16bars of this chord across the songbook
6songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 4×.