Have You Ever Seen The Rain

Have You Ever Seen The Rain is a nice beginner friendly song to learn, but some bits can be tricky if you’re just getting started. We’ll cover different options, so no matter where you’re at, you’ll still be able to play it! This is definitely the kind of song we should all have in our arsenal, no matter if we’re playing acoustic or electric guitar!

The intro

To play the intro, we’re going to need A minor, F, C and G. All of them are open chords except F, but we’ve got a few options to play this chord. We can play with an open shape, a barre chord, or even use the thumb over technique.

The structure of the intro is pretty straightforward, we’re playing A minor for a bar, followed by F for a bar. We’re then going to play C for a bar and G for a bar, before going back to C for two bars.

Let’s now put our focus on the C major chord we’re playing. What we play is a C/G instead, which is essentially the same chord, but with the note G on the bass. That C/G chord is what you can hear on the record, and it’s a pretty common chord, so I really invite you to try and get used to it.

If you’re comfortable with it, you can play this C/G instead of C everywhere you want, but if it’s too much, C major still works perfectly well!

Time to jump to the strumming pattern, and the great thing about Have You Ever Seen The Rain is that the pattern is very consistent. There are a couple of guitars on the record, but we’ll focus on what the electric guitar is playing. This is a very busy pattern, where we’re playing every 8th note, except on beat 2!

Another little detail we can add is the actual start of the song, where we can hear two strums before beat 1 of the first bar of the intro. What’s happening here is that we have a couple of pickup strums on the A minor chord, with a quick “down up” just before starting the intro.

These two strums are on the “and” and the “a” of beat 4, so you can think of it this way:

The verse

To play the verse, we only need C (or C/G) and G, which we’ve seen before. The structure is easy to remember, we play C for four bars, G for two bars, and C again for two bars. Then, we repeat the same eight bars in the same way!

Something to be careful with is that when we get to the end of the first half of the verse and start playing the second half, we have six C major chords to play back to back (two at the end of the first half, and four at the beginning of the second half). This is something that can be a bit confusing, as it’s pretty easy to get lost in a structure when we stay on a chord for a long time. Make sure you’ve got the melody in mind as that can really help you know where you are!

The pattern we’d play on the verse is the same as the one we’ve seen in the intro, so let’s try to make it sound a bit more dynamic! A very good option here is to mute the downstroke we’re playing on beat 2, using our right hand.

It can be a bit of a challenge at first, but you’ll see that you’ll get a lot closer to the sound of the song when you do that!

Of course, if you feel like you’re getting there with this pattern and the little mute on beat 2, feel free to add it to the intro’s pattern!

The chorus

To play the chorus, we’re going to need to play F, G, C, C/B, A minor and Amin7/G. Most of these chords we’ve seen before, and I know the name of the other chords can be a bit frightening, but you’ll see that they’re not much harder than the ones we’ve played so far! And even if they are too hard to play at first, don’t worry, we’ll see how to play the chorus without them further down.

Let’s focus on C/B and Amin7/G that we’ve not seen yet. The idea is the same as the C/G we’ve played before. We take a chord that we know, and change its bass note. What we want is to highlight the little walk-down that the bass plays within our chord progression using these chord shapes.

So on C/B, we can now highlight the note B, and on Amin7/G, we can highlight the note G.

And the structure is as follows:

Let’s look at the pattern we can play on the chorus. We’re going to keep the same exact pattern we’ve seen on both the intro and the verse on most of it, but on the two bars where we play C/B and Amin7/G, we’re going to change it to this:

What’s important here is to try to target the bass note of the chord when we’re playing the downstrokes on beats 1 and 3 throughout these two bars. That’s how you’ll hear the bass line going from the note C to B, to A and G!

If this is too hard, we can simplify the whole chorus, so we don’t have to play these two new chords and we can stick to the same pattern we’ve seen on the intro and the verse. All we have to do is swap the new chords with a C and an A minor chord!

And that’s it! All we have to do next is to try to play the whole song. The structure of the song is intro, verse, chorus, verse and then the chorus twice to finish.