Lauren Bateman teaches Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising" using just three chords: D, A, and G. She walks through multiple strumming patterns, including a syncopated version that mimics the original recording, and breaks down the verse and chorus structure before playing it through.
I see.
Fantastic.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. My name is Lauren and I'm here to do some Bad Moon Rising with you guys by ccr. So what you can do is go to my website, laurenbateman.com I'll put a link below the video to the chord chart. This way you can go print that out, come back here and have all your chords and lyrics so that you can follow along with me. Now, looking at this chord chart, the great thing about this song is it's only three chords and they're pretty repetitive. So that's fantastic. So. So we have a D chord, an A chord, and a G chord. And the majority, I would say 50%, maybe even more, 60% of the song is played on a D chord, which is great, unless you hate the D chord, which is also great because it gives you practice on working on the D chord. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the intro and the verse. But before we get into that, let's talk about the strumming patterns that you can use. Obviously, the simplest strumming pattern is always to do just four downs. Now, most of our chords are full measure, meaning we would do four downs per chord. So if we look at our first chord in the song, which is D.
It would be 1, 2, 3, 4.
If you want to spice it up.
A little bit, you can do 1, 2, 3, 4. And you can throw a little up.
Strum on the end.
1, 2, 3, 4.
And that's one simple way to do it. Another way to do it is to do a slightly more simple syncopated where we're not going to be doing a down on one of the strums. So you can either do the full syncopation, which is down, down, up, up.
Down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up.
It's a very popular strumming pattern.
One, two, and. And four, and one, two, and. And four. And.
Or if you want to make it sound a little bit more like the song, just. Just skip the first step. Okay, so the 1, 2, 3 and.
4, and 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3 and 4.
And kind of gives you a little bit more of that push like the original song has. So again, that's 1, 2, 3 and 4.
And 1, 2, 3 and 4. And down, down, up, down, up.
I kind of strum as if the 3 is there, but I don't hit. That's the secret to that. And that'll give you more of that feel.
So as you heard, I'm just doing downs on the a and G, 1, 2, 3, 4. Because they split a measure, so each chord is two beats. So if we look at this chord progression, we have a D chord, which is a full measure, 1, 2, 3, 4. And then we have A, A, then G, and then back to D's.
1, 2, 3, 4. And 1, 2, 3, 4.
And that's pretty much the strumming pattern for this song, and we'll use it throughout. So if I just show you how that sounds like again, using the simplified.
That's the simplified one with a strum on every beat. The syncopated version.
Gives you more of the feel of the song. Now, remember, it's ccr, so they probably have another guitarist doing some other cool things too. But the whole goal of this is to try and simplify things or give you guys a version that you can probably play along with. So that is our intro in our verse. So we have D followed by a half measure of. A half measure of G and then two measures of D. The chorus, everything is full measures. We have two measures of G, two measures of D, a measure of A, and two, a measure of G and a measure of d. So that's two GS, two Ds, an A, two G and D. That's our chord progression for the chorus. And we don't have to change the strumming pattern. We can just keep using our same ones.
And if you also. Maybe you're hearing this and you're like, what is she doing to make that sound so cool? I'm accenting the second beat. I'm kind of making that ring out more.
One, two, one, two, one.
By kind of giving that second beat a little so.
So you can hear that second beat. I'm letting it ring out. I'm kind of digging in just a little bit more on that one to give it a little slight spice. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through intro, verse, chorus, just so you guys can hear it. I'm going to use that slightly more syncopated strumming since it sounds a little more like the song. If you can't do that, don't worry. Even if you can only do one strum per chord, that's fine. So we have the intro. Here we go. 1, 2, 3, 4.
I see trouble all the way.
I see love breaks like you.
I see bad times on the stage.
There's magne.
And there you have it. That is bad. Moon Rising by ccr. Super simple song. It's a little peppy. So your chord changes do have to be up to speed. If your chord changes aren't up to speed, that's alright. Just simplify the strumming. That's the whole goal. So I hope you guys enjoyed this lesson. This is a super easy song that we can learn how to play and I will see you in the next video lesson.
