Lover by Taylor Swift Tutorial/Lesson
Lover
G, Dsus4, Cadd9, Em7, F#m, Am, F, C, D, Em
Download Printable Guitar Guide
Unlock with Patreon
Are you new to playing the guitar? Watch my free Beginner Series where I show you all of the basics. You'll be playing your first songs in minutes!
Video transcript
hey everyone my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play lover by Taylor Swift on the guitar so go ahead and stay tuned if that's something that you want to learn alright so let me just go ahead and be a little bit upfront with you the way that I'm going to present this tutorial is going to be the way that I played it in my cover which did involve a lot of picking patterns as well as using ten different chords however there is a kind of easier way that you can play this with just the strumming pattern that I'll show you as well as like the easier version of the courts so this can still work if you are a beginner but if you want to play the way that I did it is going to take a little bit more of an intermediate level guitar player but don't be afraid it's a really beautiful song and once you get the patterns down for that picking it becomes really easy because it's really repetitive so in addition to that you also do not need a capo to play this song in the original key and my guitar is in standard tuning so with that being said let's go ahead and jump into those chords all right so let's go ahead and take a closer look at some of the chords that you need to know like I said earlier there are seven chords that are required to play this song however I actually like to use ten different chords because three of them are variations of each other so let me go ahead and go through them for you the first chord you need to know is g which looks like this and sounds like this all right after that we've got D suspended for which looks like this and sounds like this next we have C at 9 which looks like this and sounds like this then we've got a minor 7 which looks like this and sounds like this then we've got F sharp minor so I have to do for that is put your first finger on the 2nd fret of the low E string it looks like this and sounds like this then from there you need to know a minor which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last chord you have to know would be your F chord which is our Barre chord and it looks like this and sounds like this so those are the seven chords you have to know for this song but there are three optional chords so they're variations of ones I've already showed you so for example this is our C AB 9 chord if you find it easier to play an open C which is like our regular C feel free to do that and you can play that in place of C at 9 so C looks like this and sounds like this and then same goes for a minor seven if you don't like playing E minor seven this way you can just play an open E minor chord which looks like this and sounds like this and then the last example of this would be D suspended four if you don't like playing it that way you can also just play an open D chord which looks like this and sounds like this all right but that's really up to you whatever you prefer playing I actually will use all ten of these chords in my cover at the end so if you want to play it the way that I played it my cover then make sure to stay tuned to the end of the video all right so go ahead and pause this video and practice those chords until you have them memorized and you'll find it rather easy to transition between them this song the transitions do go a little bit quickly in some of parts of the song so definitely make sure that you are used to that before continuing but when you're ready go ahead and continue and we will go through the strumming pattern that you can use with this song alright so like I said at the beginning there's only one strumming pattern that you need to know that you can use and apply for the whole song so I'm gonna go ahead and show it to you here it is it's down down up down up and we're gonna play through this a few times for each chord so let's go ahead and go through the rhythm of how this sounds so let's put our first chord on which will be our G chord and we're just gonna strum down down up down up alright so let's go ahead and put that in rhythm we've got down down up down up one two three four down down up down up down down up down up down down up down up all right great job so once you get that rhythm down all you have to do now is add in some of those chord transitions so I'm going to go ahead and start at the beginning of the song and we're going to transition from G to D suspended for to see AG nine so what we're gonna do here is play the G and the D suspended for for one whole time through and then we're gonna hold our C at nine through two times for this pattern so we've got our G chord on down down-up down-up then here you switch chords to our be suspended for down down up down up then you switch to see at nine and then we're gonna play through this pattern twice down down up down up all right let's practice that through again from the beginning we've got G down up down up D suspended see at nine twice G down up down up D down up down up down up down down up down you awesome and so once you get that pattern down and you've got that rhythm down all you have to do now is apply it to the whole song so let's go ahead and go through the chorus and I'll kind of show you how that would sound within the song so we've got our G chord on 1 2 3 & 4 take me home up down up down down up down and then here for the kind of rundown that she does at the end of the course this is the only place where we're going to kind of switch chords before the pattern is over so let me go ahead and put it on screen so that you can see it and you can see now we're going to be changing chords in the middle of this drawing pattern so if we're doing your my my my my lover we're starting with our G chord and we're doing it down twice down down then we go to our F sharp minor chord and then we finish out the pattern down then we switch to our E minor seven and then down down and then our D suspended four down and then our C down down up down up then we're gonna go into our last down and then mute those chords so I know that's kind of a lot let's go through that again slowly we've got our G chord on so we've got G down F sharp minor up down up D minor seven down down D suspended for up down up then C at nine for the whole pattern through down down up down up and then one extra down down leather alright so let me go ahead and put some singing in there so you can hear what it sounds like and we're gonna go through this whole section without stopping so starting on our G we've got down down up down up down down up down up down it does get a little bit more natural when you practice a little bit more and when you go a little bit faster so let me just speed it up for you a little bit so you can hear what it sounds like in rhythm alright so you can see the pattern itself is not changing all we're doing is we're doing our chord transitions a little bit faster here for this kind of rundown at the end of the course but again this pattern is very applicable for the whole song you can do it through all the verses and the courses as well as the bridge so if that's something that you're comfortable with and you want to stick with strumming patterns go ahead and use this strumming pattern for the whole song however I personally really like to play it with a beautiful picking pattern so if that's something that you're interested in learning as well then go ahead and stay tuned and we will go through our picking patterns next and with every guitar strings go around my hand I take this magnetic force of men to be my alright so once you've got that strumming pattern down let's go ahead and take a look at some of these picking patterns that I like to use for this song so let's go ahead and start with the first speaking pattern and let's start with our first chord which is our G chord so go in for your G chord shape on and what we're going to do is all of these patterns are gonna follow kind of the same thing where your thumb is going to pick the bottom most string so for our G chord that would be our sixth string and then your pointer finger middle finger and ring finger are all going to be on the same strings each time so we've got our pointer finger on the g string which I'm gonna number as number three and then we've got our middle finger on the B string which I'm gonna number as number two and then we've got a ring finger on the top E string which I'm going to label number one so we've got our thumb on 6 and our pointers and middle and ring finger on 3 2 & 1 respectively ok so for our G chord if you pick those together like that alright so what we're going to do for our first picking pattern is we're going to pick each of these strings from the bottom so the sixth string to the top the first string okay so with our g string we've got our bottom is six and then we're gonna pick our three two one with our pointer middle and right okay so again that's six three two one six three two one and that's the hole picking pattern and all you would do is every time you do a chord change you would just do the bottom note of that chord change with your thumb but these three fingers will always still stay on these top three strings okay so for example if we were to go to from G to let's say our D chord our D suspended for now our lowest note is going to be our fourth string our D string so I'm moving my thumb from the sixth string to the fourth string but these three fingers again are still the same so now we've got four three two one so from G we've got six three two one then D suspended four three two one then we will go to our C at nine and like you guessed it our thumb is going to move to the bottom string which will be our fifth string but again our three other fingers will be on the top three so we've got five three two one all right so we've got G D suspended cf9 twice and that's that intro there okay and if that's the level of picking that you're comfortable with and you think that you can do this you could actually use this picking pattern for the whole song so let's go through an example of the chorus we've got twice this right and that is the first picking pattern like I said if that's what you're comfortable with you can continue doing that for the entire song but one quick way to kind of dress it up that's really not that much more difficult is once you go from the bottom to the top you're just gonna go back from the top to the bottom so what I mean by that is we're just gonna kind of add to this picking pattern so if you put your GG chord back on the pattern as it is right now for picking pattern 1 is 6 3 2 1 right so what we're gonna do is just kind of add back to this and go back down the guitar so we've got 6 3 2 1 2 3 right so I'm just kind of adding some notes back to that so we've got picking pattern 1 6 3 2 1 then we're gonna come back pick that 2nd string again and then that third string again all right and that's the whole pattern for that and again it would be exactly the same as picking pattern one except we're going to just go back up the guitar each time so we've got G D suspended cn9 twice be perfect so that is actually our second picking pattern like you can see it's very similar to our first one we're just adding a few more notes so if you find the first one to be pretty easy then go ahead and try the second one and it's just something simple that you can add that will make it sound a lot more full all right and so with that being said let's go into our third picking pattern so this third picking pattern I only used during the walk down at the end of the chorus where she goes my my lover where it kind of goes down really fast and does those courtrand just moves really fast so the way this pattern is gonna look is very similar so if you put your G chord back on we've got our bottom note which is our six then our pointer finger on the three and then our middle and our ring finger on two and one so in picking pattern one we did each of these strings separately six three two one the way that I'm gonna change it up now is we're gonna play the two and the one at the same time so they come together so we've got six then three and then two and one at the same time all right so I've got all right and this pattern again is going to apply to all of the cords so during that walk down we've got our G and then our F sharp minor and then our E minor 7 and then our D suspended 4 and then our C at 9 so we're gonna do this same pattern through for each of those cords so let's go through an example of this pretty slowly we've got our G chord on 6 3 2 & 1 then you switch to your F sharp minor and we've got 6 3 2 & 1 alright next is a minor 7 and for this you can just take your first finger off completely so all that your all things are holding right now is our ring finger and our pinkie finger and then we would do e which is again 6 3 2 & 1 alright so for those first three chords it's 6 3 2 & 1 so we've got G 6 3 2 1 and then we've got a sharp minor 6 3 2 1 then we've got a minor 6 3 2 1 and then from here we're gonna go to our D chord so again don't move these fingers anywhere we're just gonna switch our thumb and go from the sixth string to the fourth string four three two one all right so let's start again from the beginning we've got G six three two one F sharp minor six three two one a minor six three two one and then D four three two one then from here we're going to go to our C add nine chords go ahead and put that down and then here we're going to return back to picking pattern to so we're gonna play every note in this chord five three two one two three and that's how we end that walk down so let me go ahead and play it through for you slowly so you can see that we've got G six three two one F sharp minor six three two one a minor six three two one d four three two one then C at nine go back to picking pattern two five three two one two three and then here I just alright so let me put that in context of this song we've got alright so this little area this little section can be probably the most difficult part of this song just because of how quickly the transitions are so it might probably require the most amount of practice but you're already familiar with the chords you already know it's the picking pattern you just kind of have to practice putting it together faster all right so go ahead and pause this video and definitely practice that little section until you have that memorized and you can kind of get through it like I said I think that's probably the hardest part of this song so once you get that the rest of this will be pretty easy alright so let's go ahead and go through our very last picking pattern so this will be picking pattern for it's very similar to the picking patterns we've already practiced but where I'm going to use this is in the bridge so what we're going to do is go ahead and put your G chord back on we're still picking the same string so for our G chord we're still having our thumb on the sixth string with our other three fingers on three two and one that's not changing okay what's changing is the order that we're picking them and so now what I'm gonna do is pick just the bottom string and then you're gonna pick all three of the other strings at the same time all right and then you're going to pick those three strings twice I've got so bottom so try that with me with your G chord we've got six three two one three two one alright and again for all of the other chords the strings that you're picking with your right hand are all the same and they're gonna follow the same pattern so we've got G then here we would do our walk down so I'm going to my F sharp minor so I'm taking off my middle finger moving my first finger up and then I've got six three and two one three two one then from here we go to our E minor so again just taking off that first finger so all that's down is our pinky and our ring finger six three two one three two one so here for this part of the bridge the chord that we're playing is our bass chord is the next one but what I actually like to do is during the walk down so you can see here I'm doing my G then I'm taking off my middle finger and putting my first finger up one string then I'm taking my first finger off and then what I do from here is I take my first finger and put it back on the low E string on the first fret so this does require a little bit of a stretch in your hand that you may not be used to but I find that it is easier to do it this way than to go full-on into the F chord shape okay so we've got G F sharp minor E minor 7 and then here I just put my first finger back on and it's still 6 3 2 1 3 2 1 so remember this is during the bridge so we've got ladies and gentlemen will you please stand with every guitar string school on hand so that's what I'm doing kind of that different F fingering than I am you know doing the F chord but if you're use if you're used to doing chords more than you can definitely still do that it would just be G f-sharp minor E minor 7 and then you would just go straight into the F chord alright again your right hand is still picking those same strings but for me like I said I like to make things as simple as possible so since I'm already in this shape for the walk down I just put that first finger back up but that's really up to you as long as it's an F chord then it should sound really well with the rest of the song so I like to use again this picking pattern during that bridge portion so let's go ahead and kind of go through the bridge so you can hear what it sounds like we're going to go through each of these patterns twice so we've got G twice F sharp minor twice a minor seven twice twice then from here I'm going to go into my regular C chord and then we're at five three two one C twice then my regular a minor chord thanks then we've got a minor twice all right and so between all of these picking patterns at some point during all during my cover I always use part of these picking patterns and I also involve that strumming pattern that I showed you just to kind of give the guitar part a little bit more interest because it's changing so I find that when you're doing covers and stuff it kind of gives the entire song a little bit more interest so if you are able to do any of these picking patterns and you are definitely able to just make sure to practice then I would suggest you know kind of incorporating all of them at some point in the song like I will do it my cover here at the end take me all right so once you have all those chords memorized and you can transition between them you've practiced through that strumming pattern and you've gotten those picking patterns down then what we can do now is put all of this stuff that we've learned together in this video and we can play through the entire song so I'm going to go ahead and put all the lyrics and the chord changes and everything on screen in front of you as well as give you a recap of what we're doing at what point in time so I'm go ahead and stay tuned and we will play through the whole song of lover by Taylor Swift good luck we can leave the Christmas lights up till January this is our place we make the best dazzling serious way bounty haven't done you 20 seconds 20 years take it take me home we could let our friends hi ladies and gentlemen will you please stand with every guitar strings go through my hand and I take this magnetic force of a man to be mine my heart's borrowed and blue all summed up with you swear to be overdramatic and true to my and you say why you today's jokes for me at every table save you sleep all right so that was my tutorial for lover by Taylor Swift I really hope that it helped you guys if it did make sure to give me a thumbs up down below as well as to leave a comment of any other songs that you have for requests or future tutorials and also make sure to subscribe to my channel that way you guys know every single time I post a new video here are my social media hisle's in case you'd like to follow me on any of those that's just where I find people to give shoutouts to Hina scenes lips and giveaways and holes and things like that this is also where I go to find people to feature in my new segment forever features this week it's Jasper playing blinding lights by the weekend let's give it a listen awesome job Jasper keep on rockin if you want to be next make sure to follow me on instagram so if you're interested in participating in any of that make sure to follow me on the social media site and if you like the shirt I was wearing today it looks like this and it sounds like this this is my forever faithful guitar chords chart shirt if you'd like to purchase this shirt or any of my other merch then you can definitely look in the description below this video and that will all be linked down there that's just a way that you can help support my channel so that I can continue making videos for you guys with that being said thank you guys so much for watching I really hope that it helped and I will see you in my next video bye you