September

by Taylor Swift • Lesson #144 • Apr 18, 2018

About this lesson

Here’s a video tutorial showing how to play September as covered by Taylor Swift. This is a three chord song, which makes it quite approachable… and you can use the capo notes below to use different chord shapes if that’s preferred. I hope it’s helpful – enjoy!

Hear Taylor play it…

Understanding the different capo options

Here’s a quick table showing how to play this song with different chords & capo positions. I’m using the capo 6 approach in my video tutorial, but you can get the exact same sound by moving your capo to any of the positions below (and changing the chords accordingly).

Capo      Chords      Key
===============================
No capo   F# B  C#    Key of F#
Capo 2    E  A  B     Key of E
Capo 4    D  G  A     Key of D
Capo 6    C  F  G     Key of C

Strumming pattern

Here’s the pattern I use. The chords are written on top, and the D and U letters represent down-strums and up-strums, respectively. The > symbol represents an accented strum, which is to be played with a bit more emphasis if possible.

F       C       G
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
D   D U D   D U D   D U   U D U
>       >       >

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