 Hi guys Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. Let's learn Love Story by Taylor Swift an amazing country pop song. So the first thing to realize if you're a piano player is there's not much piano at least the hook which you hear comes from a banjo and then you have a prominent electric guitar as well as acoustic guitar. So it's not really a very piano centric song but we can take some influences from these other instruments which are there in the song as well as follow the vocal line by Taylor Swift and try to incorporate that as well in the piano. So the way I've broken this song is there's an intro which is that banjo intro which I'll teach you last as usual in these tutorial videos. Then we'll go through the verse, the pre chorus, the chorus then the guitar solo which has pretty much the same chords as the chorus then you will have a bridge which is a breakdown then it builds up again and then it goes to a scale change. So the original song is on the key of D major that's what I'll be teaching you on and the same song then drifts to the E major scale right and the chord progression remains the same it just has to be replayed or retransposed and by doing it on a higher scale the song tends to get a lot more energy if you will right it goes to the next level the singer also sings higher in pitch and so on and so forth. So let's first get to the verse and I'm going to first break down the chords and then we'll try and look at a couple of patterns on the piano and I'll try and give you as many patterns as I can think of maybe a couple or three at least so so that you can find out a pattern which you like or which works for your skill level right so let's get cracking. So in the verse so we are going to ignore that banjo intro which I'll teach you later which is we'll also try and learn that so first the verse part when she starts singing so that's D major G major B minor A major one more time and so on so most of the landings of the vocalist are on these roots in any case it's on the D major triad she's staying pretty much on that D right then she says B sings B and then you find a chord which has the note of the vocal line right so in addition to playing the verse this way you can play every chord four times this could get the job job done B minor and so on another thing you can consider doing is a nice arpeggio pattern which I'll play it once and then I'll I'll tell you what's going on right so what I'm doing in the I'll just show you for one chord so you do D you can do D with the fifth supporting it which is A or you can do D with D octave I I guess for the D chord I'll go with D with D octave so if you're counting it'll be one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven or a better way to count would be one and two and three and four and one twice so this works for all the four chords so for the B minor in the A major chord I'm playing it with their respective fifths for the D and G you can play it with the octave it's just something I'm doing but if you like fifths you can do fifths throughout if you like octaves you could do octaves throughout right let's do it up to speed do this for pretty much the entire verse another thing you could do is you could play broken chords but that we'll probably leave for the other parts of the song right let's now do the pre-chorus and the pre-chorus chords are mentioned there there's G A B minor D then G A B minor for two counts G and A so what I meant by this sort of bracket is you need to play you're going to change the chords faster than the verse as well as the chorus so it just means a faster chord change so you could do G A so it ends with a G and an A so let's revise that again G A D major sorry G A major B minor three four so last two chords are very unique B minor A right so it's two counts one two three chorus okay I'm counting it as one two and three and four and right but you could even count it as one two three four if you wish right so the pre-chorus well you could continue the same arpeggio pattern which we saw for the verse let's try that first B minor and goes to the chorus right so with the pre you can play that way or another way you can do the pre-chorus could be just to hold the chord in the right hand and do a build up in the left hand you can even hold the G and the A at the end let's do that again so it's like a four is to one ratio one two three four right the left hand's going four and the right hand's going one let's see how that works G A D minor D Nana G A major B minor that pattern could also work another thing you could do is you could take a power chord or a fifth chord of the D scale which is D A D or you can build it from the A that'll be A D A and then in the left hand you can just play an arpeggio around that or if you want you can also do a break up the chord but I guess an arpeggio would also work but then we already have can do that or if that gets boring you're basically using the chord tones of the respective chords with the fifth and the root and the fifth of the scale sort of kept very very importantly played so so this is how I'm playing the G chord then the A chord I'm just adding a C sharp there instead of that A which got boring so G you can do B or you can do A there I guess I'll do B so basically these two fingers remain identical and you're just using your thumb which is like the most flexible angular finger you have right so you can play around depending on what note you think works the left hand's not going to change it's just the right hand which is playing around and that's what happens with the banjo in the song so let's now move to the chorus of the song which is the hook and whatever we do with the chorus also works very well for the guitar solo which is to follow right so the chorus you can try to play like a let me first show you the chords it's a one D major again D major five of D which is A major D minor which is the sixth minor G which is the four major A which is the five major again so you can pretty much play that way so four hits or eight hits for each chord one two three four five six seven eight that would work fine but what I thought you could also do is follow the vocalist a little perhaps you could do something like just basically follow the vocal line and again you have A and D and the rest of the notes of the chord come here with these two fingers while with the other fingers you're trying to copy or capture the some aspects of the vocal line so it could sound like this D major can also play a few more notes or you can add some of the arpeggios which I talked about in verse and the pre so if you're not aware of playing that just hold the chords I think that should be fine and another thing I'm doing with my left hand is to try and play every off beat which is the and of the bar with my thumb of the left hand very softly if you can do it do it if you can't just hold it however if you can add that eighth note makes it a bit more energetic right and try to play it with a lot of dynamics get louder get softer follow your singer at those melodic lines there so with the right hand you with the chorus you can start with basic chords and then add the thumb on the eighth note as a soft ghost like sound and in the right hand with the top fingers you can try and do follow the melody line of the singer right so that's about the chorus now you can look at perhaps the bridge of the song for the bridge of the song you can just keep it very simple um just hold the chords which is that's only twice and a good way I I think you should consider playing is played with some spread voicing so b f sharp and d right so you can you can go quite low in your chords and it won't sound muddy g g db that's the voicing you don't have to go that low you can go high na na na na na na na na na na na the voicing is nothing but root fifth and third not root fifth and octave it's root fifth and third we'll also put a link uh wherein you can watch a video on spread voicing I've taught that in quite quite amount of detail so after the bridge what happens is they do the chorus on the old scale and right after it's on the old scale which is d there's a sort of a stop and then the song goes to the e major key where you play play pretty much the same thing but the e major transpose chords which I've written here which is nothing but e b c sharp a and b which is still one five six four and five of the scale of e major earlier you did the whole track on d major so the e major chorus let me just demonstrate very quickly so it comes from the d major chorus right so you go na na na na na na na b minor one two stop so you stop at the three g two three four a two stop and then it goes to the e chorus na na na na na na na na c sharp na na na na na a and with all of these with the entire set of sections which I showed you you guys need to use inversions which is the closest way you can frame the chords together if you have doubts on chord inversions do check the description we we will have linked up the chord description series which you should check out if you're not familiar with playing chords close to each other right and finally coming to the banjo intro and the guitar solo which at some point you guys may play or want to play so the banjo intro happens at the intro and the solo happens in the solo if you have a guitar player he's going to do it if you don't you could do it it sounds quite nice on piano so let's see how the banjo intro sounds first of all this is the first way to play it where you take so I've written the notes here so you can follow it there one the easier way to play it I guess would be to play the first note in your left hand and the remaining notes in the right hand because it sort of pedals it repeats right right so I'm doing F sharp F sharp A E D E D A D okay that's the high E here into two all these are into two second chord so what did you do you just move the F sharp down to the E here and then third chord now you come back to F sharp move the A to B G F sharp with A on the thumb F sharp with a B on the thumb with an A on the thumb you could also consider playing this throughout the chorus as well it'll sound quite nice to the chorus or maybe even the verse you just have to change the order of these chords which I'd leave to you guys to experiment another way to play this is to try and play it with one hand and play the bass notes in the left hand that'll make it sound a lot more bigger A is the bass B minor and so on yeah but it gets a little tricky sometimes for some of you perhaps but if you can build towards doing the intro independently in the right hand and the bass notes in the left hand it'll sound awesome coming to the guitar solo the guitar solo is written here and it's played over your chorus chords so it's quite easy let's let's just look at it I'm just following the notes D D G D F sharp D E D D E D F sharp D E D gap there's a gap in these lines so A over the D chord you're going to do repeat you come to the A chord so that's D E D F sharp D E D E D C sharp D E D and then B minor chord it's like a long descent right then G okay the last chord the last one E D D C sharp C sharp B B and then the scale change and so on so you have the banjo intro it also sort of happens at the outro as well so yeah it's it's quite a nice song to play on the piano even though if you hear it you may not distinctly hear the piano I guess it's used maybe as a passing instrument to hold chords but it's a very nice song to play on the piano and follow the chords to to what I've written and also follow the timings of each chords and check the descriptions for links to the other tutorials if you have doubts with whatever I'm saying and have fun playing the song cheers