I Love You

This Fontaines D.C. song has a pretty simple structure, but with a clever use of layers and chord shapes, they’ve managed to create a song that sounds very rich and dynamic. Let’s dive in and see how they did that!

The Core Progression

The core progression of this song is pretty simple. We only need four open chords, E minor, G, A minor and C, all in open positions.

We’re going to play each chord for a bar (four beats), and the structure is going to look like this:

Let’s now look at the strumming pattern. The pattern itself is pretty straightforward, with the exception of a push on G major and C major. That means we’re going to play these two chords “early”, as in, before the beginning of their bar.

You can have a look at the pattern below, with the push we’ve just talked about on the “and” of beat 4 of the first strumming pattern.

Again, the song follows this structure throughout, so make sure you get used to it before moving on!

The Second Guitar

The second guitar plays the same chords we’ve seen before, and it’s following the same structure, but it’s using different shapes. E minor will be played using a D shape, while G major, A minor and C major will be played using an E shape barre chord.

Let’s now look at the rhythm of this new guitar part. As you’re getting more advanced, you’ve probably already noticed that patterns are rarely looped in exactly the same way throughout songs, and it’s definitely the case here. The best thing to do to get started is to play the same pattern we’ve seen on the previous guitar part, but skipping beat 1 on E minor and A minor.

Once you’ve got this, feel free to experiment and strum more or less.

Another little detail to help you get the right sound, when playing this second guitar part, try to “drag” the pick a bit so you get that very laid-back feel. The idea is almost to hear the strings one after the other. Basically, don’t strum too fast!

The Motif

The motif is played in one hand position. There are three different shapes in total, but the idea is to move as little as possible, so make sure you have your index finger and your fourth finger on the G string when building the first shape! That will help us be efficient when we transition to the second shape.

We also have a little hammer-on to play on the G string with the middle finger on fret 8, so we can think of this as our third shape.

The timing is very consistent, we’re just playing consecutive 8th notes!

The Melody

Let’s now dive into the main melody of “I Love You”. You can hear this one coming in and out throughout the song, especially at the beginning of the track. All in all, what we’re playing is just a melody on the E minor scale. Most of it is played in E minor shape 4, but we sometimes reach for the note B on fret 2.

A nice little detail to think of is to slide to and from the B we’re playing on fret 2 on the A string, that will add a bit of colour and a laid-back feel!

The Huge Break

This break is absolutely huge, and very dynamic. The idea is to start from the motif we’ve seen before, but as you progress through the break, start strumming more and more instead of targeting individual strings.

We eventually want to strum these two chords with high energy down strokes!

On top of this part, we’re still hearing the same chord progression that we’ve seen before, played with the same shapes we’ve seen when studying the second guitar part. The main difference here is that this guitar is now playing a lot more! We want to strum all the eighth notes with downstrokes, keeping the push on G and C.

So the pattern you’re playing would look like this:

Finally, we’ve got a beautiful little melody, played only on the D string, using shapes 1 and 5 of E minor pentatonic.

In Conclusion

This is such a great song to learn at any level! If you’re a beginner, focus on the first guitar part and the melodies we’ve looked at, but if you’re more advanced, try and learn all of them!