Taylor Swift
Love Story chords
Love Story by Taylor Swift is a beginner song in D, played with a capo on fret 2. The whole sheet is 4 chords (D, A, Bm, G) across 5 sections: Intro → Verse ×2 → Pre-chorus → Chorus → Bridge. 3 of the 4 shapes are open chords and Bm is the one that needs a barre. It sits at roughly 119 BPM.
By Chiye · Updated
Hardest change in the sheet: A → Bm, 5 times.
- Difficulty
- Beginnerbarre shape Bm
- Key
- Dwith a capo on fret 2
- Tempo
- 119BPM
- Tuning
- Standard (E A D G B E)low to high
- Chords
- 43 open, 1 with a barre
- Sections
- 5each with its own progression
Chords in Love Story
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♩=119
Verse× 2 · ♩=119
Pre-chorus♩=119
Chorus♩=119
Bridge♩=119
Printable one-page chord chart
How to play Love Story
Love Story is the best introduction to barre chords a pop singer ever wrote, because you only need one: Bm. The rest is D, A and G, and the whole song moves in a tight loop where two of the three open shapes share fingers. From D to A, keep your ring finger on the B string at fret 3 and just lift and lower the other two — that single anchor removes most of the squeaking beginners get here.
Capo on fret 2 keeps you in the recorded key of D while those shapes stay open. The pre-chorus is the only real change of colour: it climbs A, Bm, D before landing back on A, which is what makes the chorus feel like a release. Play the verse quietly with a single downward strum per chord and open up in the chorus.
Practise at 100 BPM first and isolate the D-to-A and A-to-Bm pairs for a minute each, since those two transitions carry the whole song. When Bm stops buzzing, run the verse loop eight times in a row without stopping and without looking at your hand. Then add the pre-chorus and chorus, and only raise the tempo once every change lands dead on the beat. If the barre still fights you, play Bm on the top four strings until your index finger builds the callus it needs.
How to practise Love Story
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
D (x-x-0-2-3-2, beginner) → A (x-0-2-2-2-0, beginner) → G (3-2-0-0-0-3, beginner) → Bm (x-2-4-4-3-2, intermediate, needs a barre)
3 of the 4 shapes are open chords, so start there and leave Bm until the others change cleanly.
Drill the changes this sheet actually uses
D → A7×A → Bm5×Bm → G5×G → D3×
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
- Devery section
- Aevery section
- Bmevery section
- GIntro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge
Climb the tempo ladder
Start at 71 BPM and move up only when a full pass is clean: 71 → 89 → 107 → 119 BPM. The recorded feel is around 119 BPM, and the last step is the one that always feels like a jump. Stay at 107 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 Love Story 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
E B C#m A
2 of 4 stay open
Fret 1
Eb Bb Cm Ab
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 2as written
D A Bm G
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 3
C# Ab Bbm F#
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 4
C G Am F
3 of 4 stay open
Fret 5
B F# Abm E
1 of 4 stay open
Fret 6
Bb F Gm Eb
no open shapes left, all barre
Fret 7
A E F#m D
3 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 Love Story clicks, these use the closest set of shapes, so the chords you just learned keep working.
More beginner songs to learn after this one: Wonderwall, Let It Be, Creep, Hallelujah.
These chords across the songbookHow often each chord in Love Story 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.
248bars of this chord across the songbook
44songs use this shape
Most often followed by G, 40×.
120bars of this chord across the songbook
20songs use this shape
Most often followed by D, 24×.
53bars of this chord across the songbook
11songs use this shape
Most often followed by A, 12×.
418bars of this chord across the songbook
59songs use this shape
Most often followed by C, 80×.