Tracy Chapman
Fast Car chords
Fast Car by Tracy Chapman is an intermediate song in D, played with a capo on fret 2. The whole sheet is 6 chords (C, G, Em, Dsus4, Dsus2, D) across 3 sections: Verse ×4 → Chorus → Outro (loop). 5 of the 6 shapes are open chords and Dsus4 is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 104 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: Em → Dsus4, 3 times.
- Difficulty
- Intermediatebarre shape Dsus4
- Key
- Dwith a capo on fret 2
- Tempo
- 104BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 65 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Fast Car
Frets read low E to high E, x means leave that string out.
Chord sheet
One chord per bar, four beats to the bar: the shape lands on beat one and the dots mark the beats after it, so you can see where the change falls without any lyrics. Where a section has no strumming pattern written, play one chord per bar. Tap a bar to hear it.
Lyrics are not reproduced for this song: they are still in copyright and this site has no licence to publish them. The chords, structure, strumming and sing-along timing are all here. Songs whose words are public domain →
Verse× 4 · ♩=104
Chorus♩=104
Outro (loop)♩=104
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Fast Car
Fast Car is one chord shape per bar, four chords around a two-bar loop, played with a capo on the second fret and a strumming hand that never stops. Capo 2 with the C, G, Em, Dsus4 shapes sounds in D, which is the key of the record. Keep your third finger planted on the B string for both Em and Dsus4 — one finger travels between fret 3 and fret 2, and that is the whole trick. C to G is the only real jump, so practise it alone: leave your index and middle fingers on the D and A strings and let your ring and little fingers relocate.
The chorus is the one place the song moves. Dsus4 loses the little finger to become Dsus2 in the bar under “and I had a feeling I could be someone”, and the D back under your fingers keeps the movement from sounding like a mistake. Play the loop as eight steady downstrokes per bar with an accent on beat one, and mute the low E string under your thumb whenever you land on Em — the bass note of that shape is the open low E, and letting it ring turns the chord into a muddy Em. On C, aim your strum at the top four strings so you never hear the low E at all.
Start at 80 BPM playing one chord per bar with a metronome and count the bars out loud, because the loop is only two bars long and the verses are eight bars of it. When that is clean, push to 104 and play the whole verse four times without stopping, then add the chorus. Record yourself once: the most common failure is speeding up in the bars where the chord stays the same. For the ending, loop the outro on Dsus2 and let the last D ring for a full bar.
How to practise Fast Car
Four steps computed from this sheet: the order the shapes are easiest to learn in, the changes that really occur in the progressions above, where each chord turns up, and the tempo ladder up to the recorded speed.
Learn the shapes easiest first
C (x-3-2-0-1-0, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → Em (0-2-2-0-0-0, beginner) → Dsus2 (x-x-0-2-3-0, beginner) → D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → Dsus4 (x-x-0-2-3-3, intermediate, needs a barre)
5 of the 6 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave Dsus4 until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
C → G6×G → Em6×Em → D3×Em → Dsus43×
These counts come from the progressions on this page, so they are the changes you will actually play, not a generic list of pairs to practise.
Know where each chord turns up
- Cevery section
- Gevery section
- Emevery section
- Dsus4Verse, Chorus
- Dsus2Chorus, Outro (loop)
- DChorus, Outro (loop)
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 62 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 62 → 78 → 94 → 104 BPM. The recorded feel is around 104 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 94 for longer than feels necessary.
Every section here uses the same set of shapes, so there is no section to single out. Whatever you can play once, you can play all the way through.
Playing Fast Car with a capo
This sheet is written with a capo on fret 2. Each card shows what you would finger at that capo position so the song still sounds exactly as written. Useful when the shapes above are awkward, or when you want to sing it higher without learning new chords.
No capo
D A F#m Esus4 Esus2 E
5 of 6 stay open
Fret 1
C# Ab Fm Ebsus4 Ebsus2 Eb
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2as written
C G Em Dsus4 Dsus2 D
5 of 6 stay open
Fret 3
B F# Ebm C#sus4 C#sus2 C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 4
Bb F Dm Csus4 Csus2 C
4 of 6 stay open
Fret 5
A E C#m Bsus4 Bsus2 B
2 of 6 stay open
Fret 6
Ab Eb Cm Bbsus4 Bbsus2 Bb
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
G D Bm Asus4 Asus2 A
5 of 6 stay open
Working out a different key? The capo calculatordoes the same arithmetic for any chord set.
More songs built on the same chords
If Fast Car clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More intermediate songs to learn after this one: Hotel California, Hey Jude, Wish You Were Here, The Weight.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Fast Car turns up across all 80 songs on this site, and what it most often moves to next. The counts come from the sheet library itself, not from theory.
363bars of this chord across the songbook
54songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 115×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.
113bars of this chord across the songbook
30songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 27×.
18bars of this chord across the songbook
4songs use this shape
Most often followed by A7sus4, 4×.
3bars of this chord across the songbook
1songs use this shape
Nothing else follows it in our sheet library.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.