Guitar Control presents instructor Darrin Goodman with a lesson on how to play the classic tune Before The Dawn by Judas Priest. Be sure to get the free tabs to go along with this video lesson.
Introduction
Hey everybody how’s it going? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing this video lesson. Today I want to show you how to play a real cool Judas Priest song called Before The Dawn. This is a really old school acoustic guitar song and I’ve kind of made just somewhat more of a simplistic version of this song and it’s really fun to play and not really complicated and pretty easy to pick up. So be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look How To Play Before The Dawn By Judas Priest.
Before The Dawn Chords
Alright so first let’s go over some of the Before The Dawn chords we’ve got. So we’ve got E minor; so I’m on the second fret of the A string with my second finger, second fret of the D string with my third finger and then all the rest of the strings are open. And we have A minor and we’re just simply going to take the shape we’re doing here for E minor we’re going to move it up from the A and D strings to the D and G strings and then drop our first finger on to the first fret of the B string and we don’t play the low E. Then we have D major; so the D string is open, I’m on the second fret of the G string with my first finger, third fret of the B string with my third finger and second fret of the high E with my second finger. Then B7; so I’m on the second fret of the A string with my second finger, the first fret of the D string with my first finger, the second fret of the G string with my third finger, the B string is open and I’m on the second fret of the high E with my fourth finger. Alright so those are all the chords that are in the intro and verse of Before The Dawn.
Verse
So for the Before The Dawn intro and the verse we start off with E minor and there’s a couple of ways that you can do this. You can play it arpeggiated the way I’ve got it written here on the tabs. So calling off strings here doing E minor I’m on’ 6, 3, 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 3, all eighth notes, you can do it with the pick or you could do it fingerstyle too. Personally I feel that I play it more consistently if I’m playing with my fingers, but either way you’re playing it works. Now if you’re going for the third string and you accidentally hit the second by mistake or vice versa or something like that it’s not a big deal because all the notes are in the chord so it’s all going to sound good. Okay so you have one measure of E minor… and then we switch to A minor and the picking pattern is very similar; so now we’re 5, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 2 and then we go to D; 4, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 2. And then to B7; 5, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 2 and back to E minor to A minor to B7 and back to E minor. So that’s like the intro and it is also the verse. It goes through it one time at the beginning just as the verse with no vocals and then I think it goes through twice for the verse. All right then from there we go into the chorus for Before The Dawn.
Chorus
So for the Before The Dawn chorus we have a couple of chords that we didn’t go over already. So we’ve got C major; so I’m on the third fret of the A string with my third finger, second fret of the D string with my second finger, G string is open, first fret of the B string with my first finger and the high E is open… And then G major; so I’m on the third fret of the low E with my second finger, second fret of the A string with my first finger, the D and G strings are open, I’m on the third fret of the B string with my third finger and the third fret of the high E with my fourth finger. And then it has this other part in here where we’re gonna do D and D suspended two (Dsus2) and D suspended four (Dsus4). So really quickly how that works is you have D and if you want to make it suspended four you just put your pinky down onto the third fret of the high E, but just leave your second finger where it is and then if you want to make a D suspended two you just remove your second and fourth finger so that way the high E is open… All right so for the chorus the picking pattern is very similar; so we’re starting with C… to G… to E minor… to A minor… and back to C again. Now this is the part where we’re going to add in the Dsus2 and Dsus4 chords. So if you look on your transcription on the chorus measures 15 and 16 have a bracket up above it, this was the number one, so this has a repeat, but it has two different endings, so if you’ve never seen this before this is what it means. So the chorus we start on measure nine and now we’re at the first ending, so it’s D, and then when we go to Dsus4 we put our pinky down… and then do the pull off from Dsus4 to regular D. Now we’re going to take our middle finger off so it’s Dsus2 and hammer-on your second finger back to the second fret… and then it just repeats… now we’re gonna go to the second ending. So we’re just gonna skip the two measures that we did that has the bracket and one and we go on to the next part where it has another bracket, but in its two measures but it has a number two, so it’s the second ending and that’s our B7… and then it would just go back into the main part of it again.
Alternative Rhythm
All right and alternatively instead of arpeggiating this Judas Priest classic you could just strum the whole song. So you could do the verses like this… or you could arpeggiate the verse and then just strum on the chorus… either way you want to do it. Sometimes if you’re just playing by yourself it’s kind of cool to do that on the verse just too kind of change things up a little bit. So like I said it’s an easy song to play with a bunch of basic chords, the B7 probably being the most difficult one especially if you’re a beginner.
Conclusion
So if you enjoyed How To Play Before The Dawn By Judas Priest be sure to give me a thumbs up and leave a comment down below if you have any questions about this lesson or any guitar related questions in general; I try to check all those out answer the ones that I can. If you have not already done so please subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss out on any of the content that we upload throughout the week. All right that is all I have for you today. Thanks for watching How To Play Before The Dawn By Judas Priest and have a great day.
For more great song lessons you can check out our Ultimate Guitar Song Collection.
