How to play Bad Moon Rising – Creedence Clearwater Revival


This video guitar lesson will teach you how to play Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival, including all the chords and the guitar solo note-for-note.

"Bad Moon Rising" was the lead single from Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1969 album Green River. It quickly shot to the top of the charts in many different countries and has gone on to become one of the great classic rock songs ever.

The chords to "Bad Moon Rising" are quite simple and will be a good exercise for the beginning guitarist. John Fogerty adds a lot of little fills around the chords but those aren't essential to the overall sound that much. Feel free to just strum the chords and leave out the little fills if you aren't to the level that you feel comfortable performing them. Or you can challenge yourself and try to play everything note-for-note. 🙂

The intro of the song uses some barre chords to play the same chord progression that is played as simple open chords for the rest of the song. Playing those chords as barre chords at the beginning of the song allowed John Fogerty to get a lot more punchy sound than was needed for the rest of the song.

If you aren't very adept at playing barre chords just yet, practicing the intro to "Bad Moon Rising" would make a great exercise. You get to play the same barre chord but shift it down to different positions on the guitar neck. That is what makes it such a great little exercise. Just isolate that chord sequence and repeat it over and over until you have it nailed.

In addition to the chords, I will also go through the entire guitar solo note-for-note. This solo is a great study of playing double-stops and chords within a solo. It is actually very catchy and compliments the underlying chord progression perfectly.

It can be a little tricky to get the solo just right. It might take an upper-beginner to intermediate level player to pull off the quick chord shifts, but it is well worth the effort!

All in all "Bad Moon Rising" is just a great song that I think would be excellent for any player to add to their repertoire. It makes for a great tune to bang out when hanging with some friends as well! Enjoy!!

Carl..

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How to play Bad Moon Rising

6 Comments

  1. Cesar Tamaca on December 28, 2014 at 4:08 am

    Your awesome guy more power to you

  2. Giacomo Bergonzi on March 19, 2015 at 11:12 am

    Hey Carl, thank you for this lesson, great as usual, it helped me a lot with the strumming. Is it ok to post requests here? If it is, then i think it would be great if you could do more CCR lessons, a lot of CCR songs have awesome licks in them and i’d really love to learn them. I was thinking about songs like Tombstone Shadow, Commotion, Fortunate Son… and many others, i’d be happy to see any CCR lesson to be honest. If you happen to read this please let me know if you plan on doing any.

    • Carl Brown on March 22, 2015 at 11:21 am

      Hey Giacomo, I will definitely be doing many more CCR songs. I will go ahead and put some of these on my to-do list. 🙂

  3. Lee Norton on April 1, 2015 at 11:10 am

    I’d like to hear Susie Q for its solos.

  4. louie on April 5, 2015 at 5:55 pm

    Hello Carl:

    I think and I might be wrong but he might play this song by dropping a whole step. I saw it somewhere and it works pretty good.

    Louie

  5. joey holt on February 6, 2017 at 5:20 pm

    hey carl would you mind doing a lesson on ”looking out my backdoor” thank you

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