Lesson 1 - Alternative Rock and Metal Guitar Riffs for Beginners

Here I'm gonna show you how to play easy alt-rock, punk and heavy metal guitar riffs using only simple downstroke picking technique from the previous lesson.

The main challenge of this lesson is:

1. to get used to the various rhythmic figures - combinations of picking and pausing that create dynamic interesting sounding and apply them first to a single power chord.

2. Next play the rhythmic figures on the power chord progressions. Here is where the riffs will be formed.

3. And finally practice over the new riffs, achieving solid playing without stumbling.

Rhythmic Figure 1

Note that my tabs does not contain information about how long notes and pauses are, it makes a tab look compact, clean and simple, without too much notations on it. Just listen to my audio/video examples a few times, get the figure in your head, fire up the drum track or metronome and here we go.

If you still don't know how to get cool sound out of your setup check out Getting the Right Sound article.

Feel free to experiment with different accenting, pausing, and dynamics, you can get really differently sounding riffs.

In this figure I make the some pauses between the 2-3 and 4-5 chord by muting the 2 and 4 chord on their ends. This creates the feeling of "action" or "musical intensity". Look at the chart below to get the idea:

In order to silence a sounding chord, slightly touch the strings with the side of the palm of your picking hand somewhere near the bridge.

Now listen to absolutely the same pattern I played straightforward without pausing:

You see how much such simple trick as pausing can make riffs sound absolutely different.

After you managed to play the figure accurately, it's time to apply it to the following metal guitar riffs:

riff 1  

First time play the riff from the 1st to 4th ordered bars.
On the repetition, after playing the 3rd bar, jump to the second version of the 4th bar (4.II) in the dashed rectangle.

riff 2  

In this riff I didn't pause between the notes.

It's comfortable to use only the index finger to press two strings down simultaneously at the same fret, the finger is bent in the way that its phalanx lays down across these strings, as on the pic:

riff 3  

In the middle of this riff you'll transit your hands from strings to strings. Work thoroughly over the transition first in slow tempo.
While even playing slowly, practice to jump to another strings in no time, without stumble.
It's truth for playing on the same strings as well, the transition between notes and chords should be fast and smooth.

If you have any difficulties with certain parts of any riff or song, it's a good practice to cut down to a difficult part, and work over it more properly.

Rhythmic Figure 2

In this figure between each couple of notes there is pausing, duration of the pause is equal to the one note. In the end of the figure there's no pausing, so the chords come straight one after another 4 times.

See the pic below to get the idea more easily

you need to withdraw from the chords crossed by the red lines.
It can feel tricky to play this sequence first, but will definitely worth the effort to master it, listen to the riff 4 right below.

riff 4  

Rhythmic Figure 3

riff 5  

This lesson was an introduction to modern metal guitar riffs and phrasing.

In the next lesson, instead of short random phrases, I'll show a few metal riffs that combined in one single song.
Moreover I included a backing track to play along with, with a drum and bass line, so you'll have something like a band simulator to mess around here.

Check out next lesson: Turning a Few Cool Metal Riffs to a Song

And look at Pick Scrape Guitar Trick, you should like it ;)

Open Tutorial on Guitar Power Chords

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