Fortunate Son Guitar Lesson Part 1

Fortunate Son Guitar Lesson Part 1 [Demonstration] So in this lesson, we’re going to take a look at very cool John Fogerty song, 1970—1970 Willy and the Poor Boys, “Fortunate Son”, kind of an anti-war thing about politics and the stuff going on in Vietnam at that time. What we’re going to do though in this song—this is really cool because he does some really interesting things here. There’s going to be an easy way to play it and the difficult way to play it. Now, what he really did was had his guitar tuned down a whole step and was playing fingering chords in the key of A. We’re going to talk about why he would do that and stuff to. But we’re also going to learn it in G—the easier way to play it and just kind of sing it. Now it doesn’t really matter which key you play it in, but basically, he has this D tuned to get the particular licks that he can do using the key of A—the key that don’t work exactly the same in the key of G. [Demonstration] The simplest way of playing “Fortunate Son” is to just strum the chords. We could play a G chord in our normal G fingering—2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers. We’re going to need to use an F as a bar and a C and then back to G. And the chords are going to go of G to D to C to G. [Demonstration] Palm muting—really important part of rhythm guitar playing. I'm playing an A chord here, I'm over the 5th fret of the 6th string and I'm just playing an A power chord. But I'm not hitting it with the normal strumming stroke that sounds like that. So when we finger “Fortunate Son” using A shapes rather than G shapes. In the theory through why that’s kind of a good thing and what are the advantages are of doing it in this case. But it really does open a door for us to do a much more complicated arrangement that lets us play the rhythm part and the lead part at the same time. So we’ll talk about that in just a second. I just want to review really quickly that if you’re playing it in A, the same strumming pattern that I talked about in the G sections what we would use. Steady down 8 downs per measure, we’re going down at the speed of 8th notes. Down, down—two big accent at once; kill the strings by relaxing your fingers on B2, and then put them back down for the end of 2; 1 and 2 and— Two accents and once on 3—3 and—then again on 4, 5, relaxing but not letting go of the strings. And then on the end of 4, letting go completely for just a percussive slap on the stings— [Demonstration]