After Midnight

 

Lesson Goals:

♦ Review the A, C, D and E barre chords 
♦ Learn rhythm pattern and chord structure
♦ Play "After Midnight"

This is a great old song by J. J. Cale that was also done by Eric Clapton. It will be a good song to work out some chord changes using barre chords.

The chords in this song are A, C, D and E. Take a moment to review the barre chord versions of these chords.

Before we look at the song, let's take a moment and name the chord progression of this song. The "A" is obviously the I (1) chord, and in the A major scale (just play the pattern starting on the A on the 5th fret of the 6th string), the "C" falls one fret below our 3rd step in the A major scale. So that is a "flat" (b) third. The "D" is the 4th step in the A major scale and the "E" is the 5th.

That means that we are playing a I, IIIb, IV, V  or 1, b3rd, 4, 5 (one, flat third, four five) chord progression.

Hopefully this is starting to make a little sense to you by now.

Let's take a look at the song below.

It is a fairly straight forward song so let's go over it in the video.