Centerfield Guitar Lesson – John Fogerty – Famous Riffs

This one is a fun one. In the mid eighties you couldn't escape this catchy little riff just about every time you turned on the radio.

In seems like to me that the intro riff we are gonna learn for "Centerfield" by John Fogerty is highly inspired by the intro to La Bamba by Ritchie Valens.

In any case, this Centerfield guitar lesson presents some nice challenges for reasons you may not realize. The hard part of this riff isn't the notes that you are playing, it is keeping the notes that you don't want to be heard any more quite which is the real difficulty of this riff.

The problem stems from the fact that we have a single note riff here in that you should aim for no more than one note to be heard at a time. What makes that a difficult proposition is that we have a lot of open strings in the riff that have to be muted right as the next note sounds.

If you watch the video closely enough you will see when I playing the riff very slowly how I am using various fret hand fingers to mute those open strings to give the riff a nice clean sound.

If anyone is interested in learning this whole song simply like this video on YouTube. After 1000 likes I will teach the entire thing note-for-note. Until then, I think this opening riff will keep you busy for a little while. 🙂

Enjoy! Carl..

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Centerfield Guitar Lesson - John Fogerty