John Fogerty And The Secret to Great Guitar Tone

Five Videos That Prove Fogerty Needs More Guitar Love

More annoying to me than the constant claim that John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival's songs are three chord wonders (not many contain just three chords) is the lack of respect Fogerty gets as a guitar player.

The guy is a hot player. Red hot.

For many people, CCR is one of those bands whose songs we start to learn early on. Maybe that’s why we don’t hold them in reverence like we do the newest songs we’re learning.

But over the past couple of years, I’ve been revisiting Creedence, The Beatles and a few other bands I was obsessed with in my youth, and I’ve found three things:

I’ve been playing a lot of these songs wrong, maybe from the start. There are subtleties, fills, tunings and chord voicings that are well worth learning. These songs are way more complex than I thought they were.

With Northern River, we perform Proud Mary and Who’ll Stop The Rain. Learning all the fills, co-ordinating them with the bass player and getting the timing of all the starts and stops with the drummer took some work. Not days and weeks mind you, but it did take some time to get them right.

Susie Q

This is one of CCR’s earliest hits, and according to Wikipedia, their only Top 40 hit not written by Fogerty. It peaked at #11.

This version is a bit more low key than the original, but I chose it because it shows Fogerty playing the song, how he gets the feedback and how he uses his heavily customized Rickenbacker to control it.

Born On The Bayou

This is a three chord song. It’s in the key of A major, but you spend most of the song playing or soloing over an E7 chord, so most people teaching you the song will tell it’s in E. It’s not.

It’s also not strictly a three chord song, because Fogerty, sly devil that he is, adds so many fills, moveable chord shapes and other shapes into the mix that he changes the harmonic structure of the song. Did I ever mention that I was a music theory nerd?

Another way to say it is he does a lot of stuff to make the parts sound different.

Bad Moon Rising

I always loved the way Fogerty would combine different styles of music into his songs and solos.

Bad Moon Rising is often over looked because so many people play Tom Fogerty’s rhythm guitar part. D – A – G.

What John is playing are E chord based shapes which sound like they’re in D because his guitar is tuned down two frets to D. For the guitar players out there that’s 6-D 5-G 4-C 3-F 2-A 1-D.

In 1969, that was some complicated stuff.

Then he takes a cue from Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue solo and plays the chords of the song, but in different places on the neck. To round things out, he adds some extended chord voicings and Scotty Moore inspired hybrid picking to keep things interesting.

And he does it all in a way that’s so smooth and subtle that you have no idea how complicated it is until you try to learn it.

Good Golly, Miss Molly

This song, first made famous by Little Richard was another nod to the people who inspired Fogerty.

It’s a blues infused shred fest that easily stands up to and surpasses most other players on the radio in 1969.

Green River

Green River is classic Creedence swamp rock. It does not have the fastest, loudest or even the most technically advanced solo Fogerty recorded with CCR.

But it has groove. Lot’s and lot’s of groove.

It bears a strong similarity to Susie Q and Howlin’ Wolf’s Smokestack Lightnin’. It also includes some pedal steel guitar inspired bends as well.

The first solo is pure Scotty Moore, rockabilly while the second solo at the end starts off very blues based and moves back to some country licks. Tough stuff to pull together, but Fogerty pulls it off seamlessly.

What About That Fogerty Tone.

Like George Harrison, John Fogerty always played for the song. While he showed some real flash from time to time, it was kept to a minimum, and only then if the song allowed for it.

He only used a few select guitars during the Creedence years, but they were heavily modified so he could get the sounds he was chasing after.

Primarily he used a Rickenbacker 325, Gibson ES-175 and ’68 Gibson Les Paul Custom. I read that Bigsby’s were added to the Rickenbacker and the Les Paul Custom. There were further modifications to change scale length for dropped tunings as well.

His amp of choice back then was a Kustom K200 A-4. Kustom made some of the first commercially available and successful solid state amps.

Loud, clean and able to get dirty while maintaining clarity. Important stuff in the bigger venues bands were playing in. He also had to 2x15 cabinets with him as well which really helped that 100 watt head fill the room.

In the studio at least, Fogerty used a Fender Vibrolux that can be heard on tracks like Born On the Bayou.

The biggest part of Fogerty’s sound is John himself. He’s a very distinctive player. It’s easy enough to get the basics of his playing down, but there are levels of intricacies there that even the most experienced players struggle to lock down.

Not only can he play those licks. He wrote them. Produced them. And over five short years, he left a musical footprint that will live longer than anyone reading this article.

Not too bad for a “basic, three chord” guitar player.

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Mitch Ross

Guitar player | Multi-Instrumentalist | Songwriter | Producer