Song · Chords
Amazing Grace banjo
The world’s best-known hymn is one of the most rewarding slow tunes on a banjo. Amazing Grace is a beautiful waltz in 3/4 time — three simple chords, a melody everyone knows, and all the room in the world to play it gently. Here are the chords, how they move, and how to practise it slow and melodically.
A hymn that plays itself
Amazing Grace was written by John Newton in 1779, and more than two centuries later it is still the best-known hymn in the world. On a 5-string banjo it is a small gift: it sits in open G tuning, so the instrument is already halfway playing it for you; the melody is one nearly everyone can hum; and it only asks for three chords. Best of all it is slow — a gentle 3/4 waltz — so there is no race to keep up with. That makes it a perfect tune for playing melodically and for practising a soft, unhurried roll.
The three chords you need
Amazing Grace is a I–IV–V hymn: you spend most of it on G, lift to C, and touch D7 before resolving home. Those are the only three chords in the whole tune. Here they are in open G — the numbers are frets, 0 means play the string open, and the top line is your 1st string:
The progression itself is gentle and repeats. Each phrase leans on G, lifts to C, and passes through D7 on its way back home:
How the chords move
Amazing Grace is a I–IV–Vtune in 3/4 waltz time — three beats to the bar, counted “one-two-three, one-two-three.” You start home on G (the I chord), rise to C (the IV) as the phrase opens up, and reach for D7 (the V) at the tension point before falling back to G. That rise and resolve is the whole emotional shape of the hymn, and it is the same three-chord move that underpins countless gospel and old-time tunes — learn it here and you have learned it everywhere.
Because it is so slow, Amazing Grace is a wonderful tune for picking out the melody rather than just strumming chords. Let each note ring, keep your roll soft, and give the tune its space. Our guide to how to play the banjo walks through the right hand you need to bring the melody out gently.
How to learn it
How you practise matters more than how long. These four steps are the difference between a hymn you can nearly play and one you actually own.
Amazing Grace is a slow hymn, so lean into that. Before you add any roll, pick out the melody one note at a time and let each note ring fully. The tune lives in its space, not its speed — hearing the melody clearly first is what makes everything you add later sit right.
It is in 3/4, so count "one-two-three" over and over until the sway is automatic. The first beat of each bar is where the chord usually lands. Getting that three-beat pulse into your body early stops the tune from stumbling back into a march.
Practise just moving G to C to D7 and back, in time, before you worry about melody. Most stumbles in a hymn like this are late chord changes, not wrong notes. A minute of clean, unhurried changes buys you a smooth run through the whole tune.
There is usually a single move — often into C or out of D7 — that catches you. Isolate that one change, play it ten times cleanly in tempo, then stitch it back in. Running the whole hymn to fix one late change wastes most of your practice.
Two things smooth the whole process. A set of finger & thumb picks give you the clean, ringing tone a slow hymn is built for, and a clip-on tuner on the headstock means every run at the tune starts in tune — and Amazing Grace lives or dies on being perfectly in tune.
Getting the full note-for-note tab
This page gives you the chords, how they move and how to practise the hymn — everything you need to start playing Amazing Grace melodically. For a written, note-for-note melody arrangement to read alongside it, a good banjo tab & chord book is the most reliable source — and the chords you have learned here will make that tab far quicker to read.