Riff River

Top 30 Guitar Riffs

mjmurphy61 — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:44:04 +0000

The last post was about great guitar solos, this one is about great riffs. Riffs are great for beginning guitar players because they aren’t always extremely difficult like chords, arpeggios or solos. Sometimes they are extremely easy, but also extremely cool!

A riff is generally distinguished from a solo by several key elements. 1) A riff is usually performed on the lower strings, whereas a solo is more often performed in the higher register of the guitar. 2) A riff more likely involves a short repetitive phrase than an extended melodic form. 3) A riff is more likely to include chords, partial chords, or power chords in combination with single notes. 4) A riff is likely to be the central part of a song, often times the reason for the very existence of the song.

Rock music has so many great riffs, it would be crazy to try and list all my favorites, but here are my top 30 favorites, not really in any order, they are are worthy of being number one!

1) 2112, Rush, Overture, Alex Lifeson

2) Carry On Wayward Son, Kansas, Kerry Livgren

3) Rebel Rebel, David Bowie, Mick Ronson:

4) Black Dog, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page

5) Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix

6) China Grove, The Doobie Brothers

7) Satisfaction, The Rolling Stones, Kieth Richards

6) Rock Bottom, UFO, Michael Schenker

7) Barracuda, Heart, Roger Fisher

Ironman, Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi

9) Crazy Train, Ozzy Ozbourne, Randi Rhodes

10) Sunshine of Your Love, Cream, Eric Clapton

11) Kashmir, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page

12) Message In A Bottle, The Police, Andy Summers

13) The Ocean, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page

14) A Passage To Bangkok, Rush, Alex Lifeson

15) Big Eyes, Cheap Trick, Rick Nielson

16) Satch Boogie, Joe Satriani

17) Queen, Tie Your Mother Down, Brian May

18) Walk This Way, Aerosmith, Joe Perry

19) Working Man, Rush, Alex Lifeson

20) Back in Black, ACDC, Angus Young

21) Sunday Bloody Sunday, U2, The Edge

22) School’s Out, Alice Cooper

23) Day Tripper, The Beatles, George Harrison

24) Enter Sandman, Metallica, Kirk Hammet

25) Have A Cigar, Pink Floyd, David Gilmour

26) Anthem, Rush, Alex Lifeson

27) Ain’t Talkin Bout Love, Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen

28) More Than A Feeling, Boston, Tom Scholz

29) Rock and Roll, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page

30) Same Old Song And Dance, Aerosmith, Joe Perry

Whew, I better stop there. There are so many more. This list isn’t a bad place for a rock guitarist to start however, so dig in and start learning them!

Next post, top guitar arpeggios….

Persistence

mjmurphy61 — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 08:32:41 +0000

We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are – Tobias Wolff, ‘In Pharaoh’s Army’

I have been teaching guitar full or part time now for over 20 years. It is the most gratifying job I have ever had. Some students come to me knowing nothing and some are fairly accomplished, but all of them come with the desire to learn to play guitar. They may not know why they want to play, perhaps their parents are urging them along and they are just being cooperative. Maybe they have friends who play and want to someday join the band. Maybe they want to write songs so they can accompany themselves and singing is their main goal. Whatever the reason, they show up each week eager to learn something.

One thing that I have learned over the years is exactly how difficult it is to play the guitar well. It really does take a great deal of time and effort and, most of all, persistence. One of the most basic aspects of playing guitar is learning to play chords and strum the various rhythms required to play simple rock or popular songs. While watching some beginning students struggle with, let’s say the F chord. I sometimes have to shake my head and remember when I struggled the same way, thinking – “I’m never gonna get this!” The truth is you can get it. It’s just about persistence.

When first learning chords is it sometimes helpful to completely forget about trying to be musical. They are just to difficult at first to make any attempt at rhythm or harmony. I often tell me students to sit down and watch tv while they try to remember the fingerings for the various chords. I suggest going through the motions of playing the chord, removing the fingers from the strings completely and repeating this as many times as possible. With enough repetitions the chord will be learned by sheer muscle memory.

The Visual Thesaurus offers these synonyms for persist: remain, stay, die hard, endure, tenacity, doggedness, continuity, preservation. These are all good words to describe what you have to do to be an accomplished guitar player, but my favorite phrase is “Hang in there!”

Drones

mjmurphy61 — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:19:04 +0000

A drone can be defined as an extended improvisation over a single bass note or “pedal tone” . It usually involves a single scale so droning is a great way to learn scales and modes on a single string. Here’s how to practice this technique. Start by picking the major or minor scale of one of the guitar’s lower open strings, let’s use A minor as an example. Play the open A string. Now, on the next higher string ( D string) find all the notes of the A minor scale (a,b,c,d,e,f,g). To create a drone simply strum both strings (A and D) while moving up and down the A minor scale on the D string. The A remains open at all times and this is what creates the droning effect. Be sure to be conscious of the rhythm. Are you playing in 4/4 time or 3/4 time? Are you using quarter notes, eighth notes, triplets? You will be surprised by some of the interesting moods you can create with this technique. Once you get the knack of it, try moving say to the E string as your drone, and then playing the E minor scale on the A string as you strum both strings. You could also try, instead of strumming, alternating the open string and the fretted string as you move up and down the scale.

Be sure to experiment with different scales and modes while doing this using different open strings. It also works in the opposite way, that is, use a higher pitched open string as your pedal tone (say the high E string) and a lower pitched string as your scale string (the B string) Don’t worry about what is musically “correct”. You may not even want to have a scale in mind at all. Let your ear be your guide and you just might come up with some mind bending effects.

Listening

mjmurphy61 — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:25:08 +0000

If your goal is to become a better guitar player, there is no better exercise than listening. By this I mean actively listening to the guitar as it has been recorded by the artist. This is the most underrated form of practicing guitar. You may think that listening is not really practicing, and most of the time this is true, but listening with a purpose is extremely beneficial and separates guitarists from the musicians.

It is best done with headphones, but it need not be. The goal is to be singularly concentrated on the music and nothing elese. There are many ways to do this. You can listen to any particular song for: lyrics, rhythmic approach, the guitar’s tone, chord progression, single notes versus chords, etc…

The game is to get inside the guitarists head and try to understand what his fingers are doing at any point in time. Are they moving quickly or slowly, what is the left hand doing, what is the right hand doing, is he playing notes, chords, arpeggios, barre chords, power chords. Try to visualize yourself playing the song as it unfolds. It is a great way to identify gaps in your understanding of the guitar. For example, if you hear a cluster of notes and you can’t quite visualize how they are being played, you can later go grab your guitar and try to replicate the technique you think you hear. You don’t necessarily need to figure out exactly what is being played, just perhaps how the guitarist is getting a certain sound or how he is using a certain scale or arpeggio to create an effect.

This is an extremely effective way of practicing. There are many benefits to listening in this way. You can immensely improve yourself as a guitar player without even picking up the instrument.

Learn One Thing

mjmurphy61 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:55:32 +0000

I once read a book called “Zen Guitar” by Philip Toshio Sudo. At one point in the book he discusses the ancient teaching – “learn one thing.” The point is that by learning one simple thing well, you actually learn many things. Applying this to music obviously means to learn one song means you have learned many songs. Afterall many songs are alike, as one song contains all the basic elements of music.

You can apply this approach not just to a song, but to the smallest part of a song – to a single note, then two notes, then to a phrase, then to an entire solo.

In practice, let’s say you are working on a guitar solo. Find (or read) the first note. Play it to the best of your ability. Just that one note. I’ll bet you can play that one note just as good as Carlos Santana or Jimi Hendrix or Andres Segovia. Take pride in that. It means you are capable of anything. Now find the next note, play it as well as the first. Now play the first and second note in succession. Continue this process of adding one or two notes until you have the entire solo mastered.

This is a nearly foolproof approach for many reasons: you are inherintly building patience, you are training your ears to hear, your fingers to feel, and your mind to remember. By the time you get to the end of the solo, you have played the earlier notes hundreds of times. It really works.

Find The White Keys

mjmurphy61 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:58:21 +0000

One of the most important things you can learn on the guitar is where to find all the “white keys.” This basically means finding all of the natural notes on the guitar, just like you would look down at the white keys on a piano keyboard and immediately know that those keys are all natural notes. The white keys are the notes a,b,c,d,e,f,g,. The black keys are the sharps and flats. This is not as easy to do on the guitar fretboard, because there are no white keys and black keys. This is the single most important thing you can do as a guitar player. Doing so will exponentially improve your understanding of the guitar.

Once you have done this, you will of course be able to play on the entire fretboard in the Key of C, because the key of C has no sharps or flats. You will also know the key of A minor, because it is the relative key to C major. They are called relative keys because the key of C and the key of A minor use the same exact notes. The two keys share the same key signature.

You don’t have to do the entire fretboard at once. Start off easy in the open position or in the 5th position. Begin just noodling around on your guitar playing only the “white keys”. You will soon find that you can continue moving up the fretboard, naming the notes as you go, all the way up the neck.

Learning new keys wlll now simply involve making certain notes sharp or flat, depending on the key signature. For example, the key of G consists of all natural notes except F which is sharp. So you only have to change one note. By doing so, you will have learned two new keys, G, and it’s relative minor key, E minor. For every new key you learn, you will just make certain notes sharp or flat, but you will have a very solid reference point – the white keys of C major and it’s relative A minor.

The advantage of this approach is that you don’t need to rely on any “shapes” that you may have learned or are struggling to learn. It frees your mind to discover your own pathways across the fretboard.

Speed: Via Slow Motion Instant Replay

mjmurphy61 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:39:34 +0000

I wish I had a dollar for every time my classical guitar teacher told me to slow down (he probably had five bucks for each time). He would say “slow is fast, you can’t run before walking, are you in a hurry to fail?” He had plenty of ways of getting the message across. He of course was right, slow is fast.

Whenever you have trouble with a passage, pretend you have just played the phrase perfectly at the right tempo and it has been videotaped. Your job is to pretend to play back the tape in super slow motion as you would view an instant replay. In other words play it extremely slowly, but maintain the rythym of the passage. Do all your rock and roll moves, facial gestures and everything – just do it really slllloooowww. It’s really kind of fun and, trust me, this technique really works.

I think some of us don’t know what slow really means. After 30 years of playing, I still catch myself playing things too fast all the time when learning a challenging riff. When you think about fast and slow to something as familiar as instant replay, it becomes obvious that a great diving catch or a great goal is just as cool as a great guitar lick, and it’s even cooler in slow motion. Try it.

Pentatonic Scales

mjmurphy61 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:56:46 +0000

Pentatonic scales are the underlying superstructure of all rock and blues and folk music. Learn them well. They allow you to improvise without any “wrong notes”. By way of being 5 note scales, they limit your choices and therefore force more creative uses than do the diatonic scales. There are countless places to learn them on the internet and from books. It doesn’t matter where you learn them from. Take my word for it though and learn the five basic shapes, where the roots are, how to hook them together across the fretboard, and how to apply them in major and minor key situations.

Welcome to Riff River!

mjmurphy61 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:40:07 +0000

This blog will be a place you can come to get inspired to take your guitar playing to a new level. Riff River is about playing guitar, improvising solos, practicing, performing, composing, teaching. It will evolve as we go along, but will be mainly prose and won’t get weighed down with tablature or diagrams or too many specific musical examples. The internet is overflowing with that stuff. I will assume you know where to find it.