Creep Ukulele Chords (Easy Version)

Creep ukulele chords follow a four-chord progression that repeats without variation from start to finish. Three of the four chords are standard beginner shapes. The fourth, B major, takes a little extra work. The result is worth it.

Creep is one of those songs that sounds enormous on a full band and still works perfectly on a solo ukulele. The four-chord loop has an almost hypnotic quality when played slowly, and the dynamics of the original, the quiet verses and the crashing choruses, translate surprisingly well to a single instrument. The ukulele version strips everything back to the harmonic skeleton, and what you discover is that the skeleton is very strong.

This arrangement stays in the original key of G major. No capo needed, no transposition. Chord progressions are not subject to copyright protection, so you can play this freely. For the complete picture on chords and how they work together, my beginner chord guide is the right place to start.

---

Creep Ukulele Chords - Diagrams

Four chords: G, B, C, and Cm. G, C, and Cm are all shapes most beginners encounter early on. B major is the one that requires extra attention, specifically a full barre across all four strings at the second fret. Take time with it before putting the whole progression together.

---

Song Structure - Creep

The same four-chord progression repeats from the first bar to the last. No lyrics are included here. For full lyrics and additional tab versions, visit the Ultimate Guitar page. Each chord lasts one bar (4 beats) throughout.

Strumming pattern for Creep

The verse calls for a gentle, restrained strum. Start with single downstrokes (one per beat) to keep the mood intimate. For the chorus, open up to a fuller D-DU-UDU pattern. One of the defining characteristics of the original is the dramatic shift in intensity between verse and chorus. Let your strumming mirror that shift. For more on building strumming patterns from scratch, my strumming patterns guide covers the full range.

---

About Creep

Creep has one of the more complicated legal histories in rock music, and it starts before the song was even released.

Radiohead recorded Creep at Chipping Norton Recording Studios in Oxfordshire in 1992, during sessions for their debut album Pablo Honey. The band, then still calling themselves On a Friday, had been playing the song live since their Oxford university days in the late 1980s. Thom Yorke wrote the lyrics after becoming obsessed with a woman he had met at a concert at Exeter University, following her around all evening without speaking to her. He described it later as one of the most embarrassing periods of his life.

The song was released as a single in September 1992 and initially flopped in the UK. Radio programmers found it too depressing to play and the single peaked at number 78. Everything changed when it started getting airplay in Israel, then in San Francisco, where alternative radio stations picked it up and it became a genuine word-of-mouth phenomenon. By 1993, the song was a worldwide hit, and Radiohead found themselves famous for a song they had already started to resent.

The legal complication arrived quickly. Songwriters Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood noticed that the chord progression bore a significant resemblance to their 1974 song The Air That I Breathe, recorded by The Hollies. They filed a lawsuit. Radiohead settled out of court, and Hammond and Hazlewood received songwriting credits and royalties on all versions of Creep. If you look at the official songwriting credits today, all seven names are listed: the five Radiohead members plus Hammond and Hazlewood.

Radiohead spent much of the 1990s trying to distance themselves from the song. Thom Yorke called it "a piece of shit" in interviews and refused to play it live for years. The band eventually reconciled with it and returned to playing it in concert in the 2000s. It has since been covered by hundreds of artists and appeared in countless film and television soundtracks. It remains one of the defining songs of the 1990s alternative rock era.

On ukulele, the song loses none of its emotional weight. The stripping back of the arrangement actually emphasizes the chord movement in a way that a full band production sometimes obscures. If you are building your repertoire of songs with a similar emotional register, the Riptide ukulele chords and the Somewhere Over the Rainbow chords offer different emotional textures worth exploring.

---

How to Play Creep on Ukulele

The main technical challenge is the B major chord. Everything else is manageable for a beginner within the first few weeks of playing. Here is how to approach the B chord specifically.

The B major chord

B major on ukulele requires a full barre: your index finger presses all four strings at the second fret simultaneously. This is one of the harder physical challenges for beginners because it requires consistent, even pressure across all four strings. The trick is to position your index finger as close to the second fret as possible (towards the body of the instrument) and apply pressure evenly along the full length of the finger. Practice by pressing the barre and plucking each string individually to check that all four ring clearly. Then add the remaining fingers. Use a clip-on tuner to check that the instrument is in tune before each session, as a slightly out-of-tune string will make the barre sound worse than it is.

The C to Cm transition

Moving from C to Cm is the second transition worth isolating. C uses just one finger on the first string. Cm uses three fingers on the first three strings at the third fret and one finger on the fourth string at the second fret. The movement from open C to a clustered Cm shape needs to be practiced slowly. Drill it in isolation: C to Cm to C to Cm, for two minutes at the start of each session. For more on developing clean chord transitions, my guide to holding the ukulele correctly covers posture and hand position, which makes a significant difference to barre chord performance.

Dynamics: verse vs chorus

The original recording is built on contrast. The verses are quiet and restrained; the choruses are loud and raw. On ukulele, you can create this contrast through strumming intensity rather than volume. A gentle single downstroke per beat in the verse, followed by a full aggressive strum in the chorus. That shift in strumming energy is what makes the song feel dramatic on a solo instrument.