Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords – A Definitive Guide

The Beatles wrote hit after hit, and using simple chord progressions. Learn the Eight Days A Week guitar chords and jam along with us!

Over 250,000 guitar-learners get our world-class guitar tips & tutorials sent straight to their inbox: Click here to join them

In this free lesson you will learn…

  • How to play “Eight Days A Week” by The Beatles
  • Stepping-stone chords for the beginner guitarist
  • Tips on nailing the strumming pattern
  • How to swing

There Isn’t A Beatles Song That Isn’t Fun To Play

Hello, Beatles fans! It’s time to take a look at one of their many, many ultra-famous songs that’s actually not all that hard to play on the guitar.

For those of us who love The Beatles, the songs are so familiar that it seems like they would be pretty easy to just pick up and play right away.

  • It’s the genius of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting style, and George Harrison’s beautiful songcraft, that those songs sound so easy and natural but can be pretty challenging on the guitar.
  • We’re finding the beginner- and intermediate-friendly Beatles songs so that you can begin building up your Beatles repertoire while gaining valuable guitar skills in the process.

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

“Eight Days a Week” gets its title from a chauffeur, who used the phrase to describe how hard he was working.

  • McCartney knew a song title whenever and wherever he heard one. “A Hard Day’s Night” is credited to Ringo, as well as “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
  • In this lesson, we’ll take you through the pioneering fade-in intro, the chords, and a suggested rhythm.
  • If you’re an intermediate or advancing beginner, the Eight Days a Week guitar chords should be pretty familiar with one or two exceptions.

Let’s play some Beatles!

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords: The Intro

“Eight Days a Week” was the first song recorded to feature a “fade-in” intro. You can hear the song building up as the intro progresses and the volume increases.

The intro is essential because it bookends the song, appearing again at the end. Learn it once and play it twice!

You’re going to take one shape and move it up the neck. It sounds very cool, and it’s pretty easy to do.

Here’s the intro, straight from the recorded version of the song.

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

Listen to the recording to get the rhythm for the intro. If you like, you can hammer on the B string note that appears in the third chord in each measure.

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

If you’re playing your Eight Days A Week guitar chords on an acoustic, you might notice right away that the tab for the intro above reaches all the way up to the 17th fret!

  • This is pretty uncomfortable if you don’t have a cutaway guitar that allows your hand to reach that far.
  • It’s not your fault! Acoustic guitars aren’t really designed for easy access beyond about the 15th fret, requiring you to scoop your fretting hand all the way around the guitar to play notes that high.

Here’s an alternate version of the intro that doesn’t sound exactly the same but gives you the same benefits: moving a chord shape up the neck and sounding cool.

It’s easy to do on any guitar. You could even play this version while your jamming partner plays the other version.

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

Learn 12 EASY beginner chords with our popular guide

  Stop struggling. Start making music.

  Learn beginner-friendly versions of every chord.

This is our most popular guide and it will improve your chord ability quickly! 😎

Get your own personalised guitar-learning plan 🎸

Get a custom guitar-learning plan here: Click here for GuitarMetrics™

World-Class Guitar Courses 🌎

Learn from the world's best guitar educators: Click here for our guitar courses

Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords: The Verse

“Eight Days a Week” is about 80% full of chords you may already know, and 20% new territory for the average guitarist.

You don’t need to put off learning this song if you don’t have a huge chord vocabulary yet though, because there are simple versions of all of the chords.

If you are an absolute beginner guitar player, you can use “stepping-stone” shapes for most of the Eight Days a Week guitar chords.

The chord progression in the verse is this:

D E G D

D E G D

Bm G6 Bm E

D E G D

Here are the Eight Days a Week guitar chords for beginners.

Use the G chord shape below for both G and G6.

Dsus2 (xx0230)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

(If you don't understand the above image please read our article "How To Read Guitar Chordboxes In 60 Seconds". It will make everything clear!)

E7 (020100)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

G6 (320000)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

Bm (xxx432)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

The reason you can use the above shape for both G and G6 is that the shape makes a G6 – a full G major chord but with an open E string.

  • One really nice thing about learning these Eight Days a Week guitar chords is that the verses are super easy to remember.
  • The first line of verse chords happens three times in the verse, so there are really only two lines of chords to learn.

Advancing beginner and intermediate players, you can opt to use these chords in the verse.

D (xx0232)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

E (022100)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

G (320003)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

Bm (xx4432)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

or (x24432)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

G6 (320000)

Eight-Days-A-Week-Guitar-Chords

Feel free to mix and match stepping stone chords and six-string chords.

That’s what coming up with your own arrangement of “Eight Days a Week” is all about.

eight-days-a-week-guitar-chords

Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords: The Bridge

“Eight Days a Week” does not have a chorus. Instead, it has a refrain, a short line of music that more or less repeats.

The refrain of “Eight Days a Week,” obviously, is built into the verse in the line with the title in the lyrics.

That means that there’s only one more part of the song to learn, and that’s the bridge, which also, coincidentally, starts with the title of the song.

The chord progression for the bridge, “Eight days a week, I love you,” is written below:

A A Bm Bm

E E G A7

how-to-play-eight-days-a-week-on-guitar

Absolute beginners take note! If the A major chord is giving you some trouble, you can always use the A7 chord and nobody will notice.

The seventh chord is just a slightly bluesier sounding version of the major chord, so if everyone else is playing the major chord (A), and you’re playing the seventh chord (A7), you will fit right in.

  • The same is true of E and E7. There’s no law saying that you ever have to play one or the other, although there are circumstances where you may notice that you prefer one over the other.
  • Listen to how the song sounds and decide how you like it best with chord alternatives!

Here are the Eight Days A Week guitar chords that you’ll need for the bridge.

A (x02220)

A7 (x02020)

Bm (xxx432)

or (xx4432)

or (x24432)

G (320000)

or (320003)

Beatles-guitar-lesson

Pro-Tip: When you’re playing the bridge, you can emulate the little snare drum fill after “I love you” by knocking on your guitar. Give it a try!

Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords: The Song Structure

“Eight Days a Week” was (according to thorough Beatles historian Mark Lewinsohn) written at John Lennon’s house.

Paul McCartney had heard the chauffeur say “eight days a week” in the car on the way over.

  • Lennon himself was not so impressed with it, but the song went to number 1 in the US, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
  • It’s true that the song is no “A Day In the Life,” but that’s what makes the Eight Days a Week guitar chords relatively simple to memorize and fun to play.
  • After the intro of the song, there’s the first verse, that begins, “Ooh, I need your love…”. The second verse, “Love you every day,” follows.
  • Then there’s the bridge, followed by the first verse again.

Easy-Beatles-songs-for-guitar

The bridge repeats, followed by the second verse. The song ends with a tag and then the intro.

Pro-Tip: Every single thing that happens in the song happens twice.

That’s economical songwriting!

  • It’s always a great idea to learn a song in pieces instead of trying to slog through the entire thing every time.
  • “Eight Days a Week” breaks up nicely into three parts, so you can learn the intro, verse, and bridge separately.

If you have limited practice time in a day, you can use that time to focus on just one part of the song.

Once you have each section down, it’s just a matter of remembering the order of the sections:

Intro

Verse 1

Verse 2

Bridge

Verse 1

Bridge

Verse 2 with tag

Intro (commonly referred to at the end of the song as the outro)

eight-days-a-week-guitar-lesson

Pro-Tip: It’s not an easy thing to get crystal clear tone out of your guitar.

  • If it isn’t the amp that’s giving us trouble, it can definitely also be our fingers.
  • We all struggle with muffled notes. One thing that can help you consistently produce tone is making absolutely sure that you use the very top of your fretting hand fingers on the strings.
  • Check out this great technique lesson!

pink-floyd-on-guitar

Download our lead guitar cheat-sheet to make things easier

It's hard to understand which scales work with which keys.

So we created a cheat-sheet! A key and scale-finder that you can use again and again.

Get your personalised guitar-learning plan 🎸

Get a custom guitar-learning plan here: Click here for GuitarMetrics™

World-Class Guitar Courses 🌎

Learn from the world's best guitar educators: Click here for our guitar courses

Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords: The Rhythm

You know what “Eight Days a Week” does incredibly well? It swings.

It’s crucial to be able to swing on this song and get the feel right, in order for it to be satisfying.

If you’re on the beginning side of learning guitar, figuring out how to swing can be a little bit tricky.

Here’s how it works: Swing rhythm, as opposed to straight rhythm, is just a way of dividing every beat not exactly in half.

In straight rhythm, which is what most of us do when we’re starting to learn guitar, the beat is divided in half:

1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &

You’re strumming down on the beat, and strumming up on the “and.” It sounds a little like marching.

free-Beatles-guitar-lesson

In swing rhythm, you’ll make the down strum on the beat a little longer, making the up strum a little shorter. It’s counted like this:

1  a 2  a 3 a 4  a

Technically, what’s happening in swing rhythm is that you’re dividing the beat into thirds, with the down strum taking up two thirds of the beat and the up strum taking up the last third.

  • But nobody thinks like that, at least not in the moment. It’s more useful to think of it as a galloping sort of strum.
  • Imagine that your hand is heavy! You strum down and then barely pull it back up before it’s time to strum down again on the next beat.

Because these Eight Days A Week guitar chords swing so magnificently, if you play the recording and strum along, you’ll get a good idea how to strum in swing rhythm.

free-Beatles-guitar-lesson

Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords: Strumming Patterns

To get this right, we need the Eight Days a Week guitar chords in front of us. Check out this chord chart for a good reference.

It’s always a bit better to learn the song without relying on paper and carting around a binder full of songs.

  • Paper is a habit, and it’s not necessarily a bad one.
  • When we have paper however, we tend to rely on it, and in a way the song stays on the paper and never really gets inside our heads.
  • If you can remember the chords and strum along with the recording, you’ll be in the habit of playing “Eight Days a Week” without any paper, and soon without any assistance at all.

Reading off the page can help to a point, but give your memory a chance to work its magic as well!

There are a lot of ways you could strum “Eight Days a Week.”

There’s a suggested strumming pattern on the chord chart, but it’s much better to start with the basic rhythm and then modify it to make your own rhythm arrangement.

  • To develop your own rhythm, start strumming a D major chord.
  • Use the swing rhythm. Make sure that you’re keeping track of the count – to make a pattern, you have to always know where the One is!

As you continue strumming, while you keep the steady wrist/arm motion going, begin missing the strings once or twice per four-count measure.

  • When you find a pattern you like, use it in the song. You’ll get used to hearing your rhythm.
  • You can also change up the pattern in different sections of the song; for example, in the bridge of the recording, there’s barely any strumming at all!

Eight Days A Week Guitar Chords & More!

If you’re as big a fan of The Beatles as we are, you’ll appreciate knowing that there are loads of resources available for learning their songs.

We like to get into detail and really help you to understand the song, and if you’d like a pile of chord charts, there are also excellent books available.

We love The Little Black Songbook – Beatles for beginners and intermediate players.

Have a great time with your new song!

Recommended Resources

If you enjoyed this free guide from the National Guitar Academy, you’ll love our other content below!

The best part? It’s all free!

What Type of Guitarist Are You?

Take our 60-second quiz & get your results: Take The Quiz

Join the world's best online guitar school 🌎

  • Get your own personalised guitar learning plan (customised just for YOU).
  • World-class online guitar courses. Learn at your own pace.
  • Community Campus & Learning Forum -  A friendly community! Connect with our team & students. 😊
  • Beginner Song library with chordsheets, tabs and tips. (Songs suitable for all levels!)
  • Regular live streams, seminars and Q&A sessions - Learn from world-class guitar educators. Get all your questions answered!

Click here to learn more about National Guitar Academy membership

Cool Guitar T-shirts 😎

Look cooler! Check out our merch: Click here to see our merch store

Want free guitar tips and video lessons delivered to your inbox?

Join over 250,000 other guitar learners and subscribe to our guitar-tips-by-email service. (It's free.)

We'll send you a series of lessons that will move you to the next level of your guitar journey.

Learn how everything fits together quickly, easily and effectively. We share ninja tips (for instant fun!) but also timeless fundamentals that will deepen your understanding.

More Cool Guitar Stuff

Learn about National Guitar Academy: About Us

Visit our YouTube channel for fun guitar videos.

Join us on Facebook for daily guitar tips.

Listen to our Learn Guitar Podcast for rapid guitar progress.

Check out our free chord lessons.

Get our best guitar tips & videos

Where should we send it?

Where should we send it?

Get our best guitar tips & videos

Enter your email address to learn our best guitar tips and tricks today!