Playing Love Train by the O'Jays on Guitar
The chords are straightforward but there are a few things that trip people up if you just look at a generic chart online. The progression is basically E - A7 - B7 - E repeating, with a minor touch on the "love train" vocal line that goes C#m - A - E - B7. That's the core loop. But the actual feel of the record depends entirely on how you voice those chords and what you do with the bass movement. Most free chord sites just list the four basic chords and call it a day. That'll get you through a campfire version, but it won't sound like the track. The O'Jays arrangement has that driving philly soul bounce, and a big part of it is the ascending bass line in the E chord — you're not just strumming a static open E, you're walking E - F#m7 - G#m7 - A7 in the left hand while your right hand keeps that syncopated skank on the off-beats. Try this pattern: mute the strings, hit the 4/4 backbeat with your palm lightly resting, then let the chord ring on beats 2 and 4. It takes about two weeks of practice to get the independence between hands working smoothly. I ran into a real headache when I was arranging this for a cover band a few years back. The problem was the key. The original is in E, which is fine for the singers, but the guitar part sits really low on the neck and it gets muddy fast, especially with a bassist playing close to it. Everyone in the room was stepping on each other's frequencies. My workaround was to shift the guitar part up a whole step to Fand capo at the 2nd fret. That cleared up the mix completely and the singers could still handle it without straining. It's not the original key but nobody in the audience could tell the difference.
Here's something chord charts rarely mention: the A7 in this progression should almost always be played as an A7sus4 resolving to A7 on the pickup into the B7. If you just nail a plain A7, it sounds flat and missing that signature soul tension. The sus4 gives you that E against the A that the organ player is doubling in the original. It's a tiny detail but it's the difference between sounding like you're reading charts and sounding like you actually know the song. The bridge section — the "stop, take a second" part — shifts to A - E - C#m - F#m7 - B7. This is where most people mess up the rhythm. They play it straight and it loses all momentum. The trick is to treat it as a half-time feel, then snap back to the driving quarter-note pulse when the verse kicks back in. It creates that pull-and-release sensation the record uses to keep the energy from going flat. If you want to get closer to the authentic sound, learn what the bass is doing. The bass line isn't following the root notes blindly — it has its own melodic counterpoint, especially on the transition from E back to E. Listen to the original track and try to play along with just the bass track for a day. It'll rewire how you think about the chord changes. The guitar parts on these classic Philly soul records were almost always arranged by session players who knew how to leave space rather than fill every gap with noise.
For learning the song, I'd skip the youtube tutorials that just strum along once and move on. Find a tab that shows the individual frets for each chord voicing and practice it at half speed with a metronome. The original tempo is roughly 126 BPM. Start at 63 and don't speed it up until you can play it perfectly three times in a row. It usually takes most people about ten to twelve hours of deliberate practice over two to three weeks to get it solid enough to perform without thinking about the shapes anymore.
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