Creep Guitar Lesson

Radiohead have evolved consistently over the years, with no album sounding like any other, but as a lifelong fan I have to say that Creep is the song that got me into Radiohead, and still to this day is a beacon of their songwriting prowess and creativity. How many other bands can make a 4 chord song sound this good?

So, in this blog post and video lesson we'll outline the 4 chords, how to strum then, where to play them and even how to arpeggiate them for the main electric version of the track. Let's dive in!

Creep Chords

Ok so let's start with the acoustic version of the track, as it seems that is often the more popular version for people to learn! The good news is that once you've learnt this, upgrading to the electric arpeggio version will be a piece of cake. The 4 chord sequence for the track is simply | G | G | B | B | C | C | Cm | Cm | - Which is two bars per chord. We rotate this sequence for the entire track, so learning it well now means you have the song nailed!

We're going to play all of these chords as barre chord shapes, which give us this set of chords:

As for the rhythm, we have a very specific groove that goes over two bars. This looks like this:

We would recommend getting the basic chords and this strumming together first, however long that takes. When you've done that, we can add in the cool suspended 4th chords that make a big difference to the sound. If we were to re-look at the chord chart with these "sus4" chords in, it would go like this: | G | Gsus4 G | B | Bsus4 B | C | Csus4 C | Cm | Cm | - Meaning that we do alternate between all the major chords and sus4 chords. Here are those chords:

As for where to bring in the sus4 chords, it's at the start of the second bar. It looks like this in the rhythm pattern:

The final thing to mention about the rhythm is that on the C minor chord we simply play the first half of the pattern twice, like this:

Creep Electric Version

The good news here is that we don't need to learn any new chords… All we need to do is arpeggiate these chords in a specific way to get the electric version. Now as you know by now, we don't provide any specific song tab here, but Franco walks you through it exactly in the video lesson.

As always, it's important to take it with a pinch of salt, as you wouldn't be expected, nor would it sound good, to be play it exactly the same every single loop of the chords. That would simply be too robotic and bland… And this is early days Radiohead, we want some style and rawness!

There is one subtle chord shift, however, that we need to note. The first G major chord does not go to the Gsus4 chord at any point. The progression therefore becomes: | G | G | B | Bsus4 B | C | Csus4 C | Cm | Cm | - Which is identical other than bar 2, which is now simply G major.