Chasing Cars Guitar Lesson

Pretty much ever since I've been teaching guitar, I've been teaching this song! It's so beautifully repetitive for beginners, which allows us to sit back and focus on just the chords and a simple riff part.

The chords help us nail some simple rhythms and changes, whilst the riff helps us develop more finger independence and alternate picking skills. We'll be doing a beginner and improver version with the chords too, so look out for that. Let's dive in!

Chasing Cars riff

So let's kick off with this fantastically simple riff. As you know by now, if you've been reading our blog for a while, we won't be adding the tab of the specific parts, so be sure to watch the video intently. Instead, we'll be breaking it down so that you gain a little more understanding each time.

The essence of the part is outlining the chord changes of the track. These chord changes are | A | A | E | E | D | D | A | A | - So nice and simple. The chord voicings you will therefore need for this riff are:

So using these shapes, you are essentially playing an A5, E major & Dsus2. Pretty cool eh? I'm not 100% sure that they meant or knew that these were the voicing names. More likely it was an instinctive thing following their ears when coming up with a riff, but cool to know anyway!

The final part of getting this riff together is getting to grips with alternate picking. As you count through this part, saying "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and" with every string pick, I want you to remember you are doing a downstroke on every number and an upstroke on every "and" beat. Like this:

Spend some time getting this bit together, focusing on the count and the alternative picking. Try and play along with me in the video if you like? You can find the full play through at the bottom of the blog post!

The Chords

Ok, next up we're talking about the chords in Chasing Cars. As I mentioned at the beginning of the lesson, this is a simple set of chords that are looped throughout the track. From a guitarist's point of view, you are either playing the riff as described above or the chord loop.

When working through this with students, I typically use the riff for the verses and chords for the chorus, but you can do whatever you like here! To remind you, the core chords are:

As you can see here, we're giving you beginners out there to option to play all of the chords in open positions. This will sound great, and is more than enough to play along with the song perfectly. If you are a beginner and still trying to get these chord shapes down, use this track as a perfect study tool for working with these chords. You can align that to the rhythm pattern too, which looks like this:

You simply play the above pattern twice per chord, which is two bars. Now, if the open chords are all too familiar and all too easy for you, you can try doing what Dan plays in the play-through, which looks like this:

So this is more of an improver / intermediate idea, as we're using barre chords and CAGED chords. What it does audibly is add a bit more interest to the chord movement, and I always like the rich sound of the full 6-string barre chord for the A major. It's big, it's chunky, and when you need to just smash a chord really hard for a while, it's perfect! 😂

So, whichever of these versions you are working with, have some fun with it. Chop and change between the riff section and the main chords, and try to play along with our video below as well as the actual song.

The band plays along!

I have to say that we wanted to have a bit of fun with this! When in a room full of creative musicians, I just can't help myself! I always have my trusty slide in hand, and the melody for this song is absolutely awesome, lending itself to being recreated on the slide. Try and play along with the parts I am playing at the beginning, and then the chord parts Dan is playing. I invite you to come and join us in this super fun jam! PS. If you love the slide stuff, check out this cool video I did on some slide basics here.

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