From their 2026 album Dopamine Chamber, Japan by Fontaines D.C. is an ideal rhythm song for developing players. The absence of bar-chords, moderate tempo and clear structure provide a cool play-along track that will extend your strumming and timing ability.
Chords: D A Em G
Pick or Fingers? Pick will give the best tone on steel strings but fingers will work on nylon string guitar.
Acoustic or Electric? Will sound good on all steel-string guitars. Okay for nylon-string players too.
Why does the time signature change in the middle section? Because the music is adapting to the lyrics. The middle section of Japan is a good example of where music has been bent to fit lyrics, rather than the lyrics being edited to make everything fit 4/4 time (boring!). This is good songwriting craft; it makes a song more distinctive.
How does the rhythm work? The rhythm guitar part of Japan is mostly a mix of quavers (half-beat) and semiquavers (quarter-beat) strums, plus a few crotchet (one-beat) strums. It may look hard but remember the tempo is only moderate. Count the verse pattern as β1β β2 and 3-e-and 4 and-aβ and so on.
Relevant pages in Modern Guitar Chord Styles 1 : To learn more about the chords and rhythm techniques used in Japan see to pages 5, 8, 10, 14 - 15, 20 and 31
Need a bit of help?
Modern Guitar Chord Styles 1 is the perfect companion for our song guides. It will teach you how to read the rhythm slash notation used in our charts (and in professional theatre and studio charts) and is specially designed to help beginners speed up their chord changes, master strumming patterns, and many other techniques.
