Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)

How to play Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Green Day on guitar

This is a great song to learn because it sounds familiar right away and feels calm and steady under your fingers. You get a classic acoustic-style progression that repeats often, so you can focus on smooth changes and clean timing instead of memorizing a lot of different parts.

All the shapes are open, so you do not need any barre chords here. The main thing to watch is the back-and-forth movement between G and D, since that change comes up a lot and needs to stay even. You may also hear the song cycle through Em and C, but the same small group of chords keeps returning.

Start by practicing the opening G - D - G - D loop slowly and evenly. Once that feels comfortable, add Em and C in the order the chart shows and keep looping the full progression. When the changes feel automatic, bring it up to tempo and aim for a relaxed, consistent strum.

Use the play-along above to follow each chord change in time with the music, or learn the shapes first with the chord diagrams below.