Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival Tutorial/Lesson
Bad Moon Rising
D, A, G
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Video transcript
hey everyone my name is Ellen and today I'm going to be showing you guys how to play Bad Moon Rising by CCR on my journey instruments of 422 travel guitar this is one of the coolest guitars I own because it is collapsible so it makes it super Compact and great for travel so if you are interested in this model or any of their other collapsible guitars I'll make sure to link them down below here is a quick overview of everything I'll be covering in this tutorial today and with that being said let's go ahead and get started all right guys so we only have three different chords to play through the entire song so we're going to start with our D major which looks like this and sounds like this and by the way if you don't know how to read these chord charts your sing on screen I Do cover how to do that my free beginner course right here on YouTube so make sure check that out right here the next chord is our a major and then the last chord you need to know is our G major and those are the only three chords you need to know to play through this entire song so go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to memorize these chord shapes as well as practice transitioning back and forth between them because it'll make learning the rest of the song so much easier and even though there's only three chords in this song it does move pretty quickly so you want to make sure you have those transitions down so if this is a skill you're currently struggling with I would recommend checking out my practice with me series that I have right here on YouTube where we go through this skill in real time together um but once you have those chords under your belt then we can go ahead and talk about these strumming patterns that you can use to play through this song all right guys so as I always say if you are brand new to playing guitar or you're somebody who struggles with playing guitar while singing at the same time the first thing I would suggest doing is to bring up the song and go ahead and play through the entire thing with a single downst strum as you sing through the song and you want to take this time to really get used to what word or what syllable you're singing whenever those chords are changing so here's a quick example of what that would look like I see a Mo Rising I see trouble on the way all right so that's just a really quick example but you would essentially want to do that for the entire song and just really take a mental note of where those chords are changing this will help you figure out things like for example you can see we're moving from our a to our G chord A little quicker than we're moving from our D to our a chord that's all stuff that you'll figure out as you do this single down Strom pattern so this actually something you do right now if you check out my patreon page I do have this entire guide available to download and print out so I'll make sure to leave that link in the description box for you but once you've done that we can talk about how we can add more to this pattern to make more of a full strumming pattern that you can use for this song all right guys so for the strumming pattern you can use for this song as you can see it's fairly simple we just have down down up down up which is a really common pattern you'll see used in a lot of different songs on guitar however in this particular song we do want it to have more of a bouncy rather than a straight Rhythm so how we're going to accomplish that is we're going to assign each beat here A Triplet okay so instead of 1 and 2 and three and 4 n which you might be more used to seeing we're going to have one and two Enda three Anda four Enda okay so each beat is broken up into like three sub beats and the reason why we want to do this is because this is what will accomplish that more bouncy folksy kind of um Rhythm for the strumming so now that we've discussed how we count that this is what it would sound like we have 1 and a two and a three and a four and a 1 and a two and a a three and a four and a one and a two and a three and a four and a down down up down up down down up all right it's such a subtle difference between the more bouncy like kind of triplet Rhythm counting versus a more straight eighth note counting so it'll definitely take some getting used to but I think once you put it in context of the song it'll make a lot more sense so basically what we want to do is we're going to play this pattern one time through per chord throughout almost the entire song um however in the chorus we are going to repeat the pattern twice for some of these chords so let's go ahead and take a look at that chorus we're starting here on our G chord you're going to play this pattern through two times for G so we have down up down up all right remember that little bouncy Rhythm down down up down down up down up to D down down up down up twice and then the rest of the these chords just gets one time through a down up down up G down down up down up D and twice on that D again all right so the rhythm is pretty straightforward but what is going to be a little more challenging about this song is the tempo so this song goes really pretty quick so once you speed up that Rhythm a little bit more it'll sound like this we've got G twice d twice a g d twice all right so that's going to be what it'll sound like a little bit more sped up in fact I think the actual song goes even faster than that so definitely pause the video and take as much time as you need to get used to this um strumming pattern and the way your arm has to move to get those motions down now the other thing I wanted to show you is that in the verse we are going to be changing chords a little bit faster so in our verse we start with our D and that's going to get the full strumming pattern down down up down up then from here on bad and moon we're going from our a to our G rather quickly so what we're going to do is we're actually going to split those two chords into one measure so one measure is going to be split between those two chords so what I'm going to do here is put a little vertical line in the middle here and that represents where we want to change our chords so now what we're seeing is we're basically repeating the last half of this pattern twice okay so on our a a chord we have down down up and then our G down down up all right one and the two and a three and a four and and that's the only place in this song you'll see that is between the A and the g that more quick transition that's the only place you want to use the second strumming pattern all right so let's go ahead and do the verse on our D chord we're sticking with strumming pattern one down down up down up then a to G is our SP split strumming pattern two down down up down down up back to D and our first strumming pattern down down up down up twice all right and that line is what you'll see repeated throughout the entire verse so without stopping we've got d a split to D twice d a g d all right and once you can play that line that's basically like I'd say 90% of the song cuz the ches is just a little bit different so once you get the core transitions down and you kind of have that more bouncy strumming Rhythm what you want to do is you slowly want to speed it up until you can get it at the original Tempo so the original Tempo like I said is pretty quick it'll sound more like this we've got 1 2 3 4 I see a b Rising I see trouble on the way I see earthquakes and Al lightning I see time all right so that's an example of the verse and that's how you would play all the verses through the song now again moving back into the chorus we're going to just stick with strumming pattern one so we're not doing any split measures here um but we are going to repeat some of these chords for two measures so again we've got G down down twice to D twice to a once g once back to D twice don't go around tonight well it's B to take your life there's a b moon on all right so basically we've played through one of the verses and one of the choruses and because the song is very repetitive you would play this exact same way for all of the verses and all of the choruses into the end of the song all right guys so again go ahead and pause the video and take as much time as you need to get that strumming Rhythm under your belt including that little split measure that can be a little bit tricky if you're a beginner so definitely just take as much time as you need to really understand how to do that and where to apply it but once you've done that then we can go ahead and take everything we learned in this video and put it together to play through the song 1 2 3 4 1 2 ready go I see a bad r i see TR on the way I see Earth on my hand I see want to have fun jaming out to the rest of this song with me then make sure to check out my patreon page you can unlock access to this as well as all my other FasTrack and play along guitar tutorials I'll make sure to leave a link for that in the description box down below if you enjoyed learning this song with me then you should definitely check out this video not only does it have a super similar Vibe and feel but it's just as fun and easy to play so I'll see you over there bye