Have You Ever Seen the Rain Guitar Lesson – Creedence Clearwater Revival

About this lesson

With our guitar tutorial on Have You Ever Seen the Rain, you will learn these guitar skills: Chords, Percussive slap, Syncopated strumming.

Have You Ever Seen the Rain is a terrific song by John Fogerty and Creedence, and it's actually not that difficult to play on guitar! There are a couple of tricks to it though, which makes learning this song really valuable to all you acoustic players since you’ll be able to use the techniques you learn here in any other songs as well.

In our guitar lesson on Have You Ever Seen the Rain, you’ll learn the intro, verse, and chorus to the song.

If you listen to the original track, you’ll notice there are 2 guitarists playing, a bass guitarist, a pianist, a drummer. This means that getting exactly the same sound from just 1 acoustic is not possible, but I really think this cover does a good job at recreating the general feel of the song.

We’ll start out with the chords to the intro, which has 1 barre chord. This might make it just a bit more difficult for beginner guitarists, so hang in there, barre chords are tough at first, but they get easy with time and practice.

We’ll also learn the strumming pattern you’ll be using throughout the song at this point, which involves using a muted strum technique, which creates a very nice percussive effect. This is a technique you’ll be able to use in other songs as a terrific embellishment for any strumming, to give it just a bit of an extra something, so learn it well.

Once we finish the intro, we’ll learn to play the verse, which is very simple if you can play the intro strumming pattern already, as it involves just 2 chords.

In the final part of the tutorial, we’ll learn the chorus chords to Have You Ever Seen the Rain, which includes a cool base walk down. It seems hard at first glance, but believe me, it’s not, your fingers just have to get used to the chord changes. Remember that your index finger stays anchored throughout the walk down bit, use that to your advantage in speeding up those chord changes.

All in all, learning to play Have You Ever Seen the Rain will be a lot of fun for acoustic players, this is a great song, and if you can sing along with it, that’s even better.

Have You Ever Seen the Rain song details

Have You Ever Seen the Rain was released by Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1970 on the album Pendulum. It was released during the time of the Vietnam War and the hippie era, and some say it was influenced by current happenings, but John Fogerty said it is just about internal tensions of the band and his brother leaving Creedence.

The song was covered by loads of popular artists such as REM, Rod Stewart, Johnny Cash, etc.

Skills you'll learn