The White Stripes
Fell in Love with a Girl chords
Fell in Love with a Girl by The White Stripes is an intermediate song in B, played with no capo. The whole sheet is 4 chords (B, A, D, E) across 3 sections: Intro → Verse → Chorus. 3 of the 4 shapes are open chords and B is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 148 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: B → A, 6 times.
- Difficulty
- Intermediatebarre shape B
- Key
- Bwith no capo
- Tempo
- 148BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 43 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 3each with its own progression
Chords in Fell in Love with a Girl
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 →
Intro♩=148
Verse♩=148
Chorus♩=148
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Fell in Love with a Girl
Four chords, one bar each, B to A to D to E, and the song is over in under two minutes because nothing about that loop ever changes. Play all four as two-note power chords or as barre shapes on the bottom four strings, and mute the top two strings with the underside of your fretting hand. The record is a wall of distorted guitar, so anything ringing above the fifth string turns to mush immediately.
Do not play these as open chords. B and A both want a barre: B at the 2nd fret and A either as the one-finger barre across the D, G and B strings or as the full barre at the 5th fret. D and E are the open shapes and are the easy part. The hard part is that A to D to E moves your hand down four frets and back in two beats, so practise that three-chord run alone at 100 BPM before you attempt the whole loop at tempo.
The right hand is the song. Everything is downstrokes, hard and short, and the chords are deliberately cut off before the next one lands. Think of each chord as a stab rather than a strum: hit it, release the pressure on the fretting hand immediately so the strings stop, then prepare the next shape. Play the loop with your left hand barely touching the strings and you will hear why the original sounds so tight.
Set the metronome to 120 and play the loop as whole notes, one chord per bar, for two minutes so your fretting hand learns the geography. Then halve the note values and play eighth notes, still all downstrokes, still with a gap between chords. Only go to 148 when the A to D to E change is silent, because at that tempo the guitar is basically percussion and any fumble is audible.
How to practise Fell in Love with a Girl
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
A (x-0-2-2-2-0, beginner) → D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → E (0-2-2-1-0-0, beginner) → B (x-2-4-4-4-2, intermediate, needs a barre)
3 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave B until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
B → A6×A → D5×D → E5×A → E1×
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
- Bevery section
- Aevery section
- Devery section
- Eevery section
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 89 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 89 → 111 → 133 → 148 BPM. The recorded feel is around 148 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 133 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 Fell in Love with a Girl with a capo
This sheet needs no capo. 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 capoas written
B A D E
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 1
Bb Ab C# Eb
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2
A G C D
4 of 4 stay open
Fret 3
Ab F# B C#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 4
G F Bb C
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 5
F# E A B
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 6
F Eb Ab Bb
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
E D G A
4 of 4 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 Fell in Love with a Girl clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More intermediate songs to learn after this one: Hey Jude, Wish You Were Here, The Weight, Blackbird.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Fell in Love with a Girl 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.
120bars of this chord across the songbook
20songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 24×.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
64bars of this chord across the songbook
9songs use this shape
Most often followed by Eadd9, 6×.