Hello dear Muse On Muse readers,
From now on we’ll start to analyze some of the riffs and licks taken from my first solo album “Vis Viva”.
In this column I explain two riffs and two licks of the song “Burning Thirst”. The guitar is tuned in Drop D (DADGBE). The key of the song is D.
First video: the first riff has a southern rock sound. Play it with a shuffle feel rhythm and let the chords ring to give more of that “dirty” sound typical of Rock/Blues music. Let the groove flowing!:)
In the second riff there’s a little more technique involved. It’s played on the sixth string (down tuned to D). The first half is played palm-muting the string to get the chugging sound, and the second half opens up. This riff has to be played very tight. Use the metronome to improve your timing.
In the second video I show two short licks.
The first is a D minor pentatonic – blues scale lick. Watch carefully the combination of the alternate picking and legato, that’s a crucial aspect to speed up this exercise.
The second lick is a D7 arpeggio, played with a legato-string skipping-tapping technique. Very important here is to “tap” the notes also with your left hand because there’s no pick involved.
Make sure to study those riffs and licks very very slow, get confident with the positions, fingering and techniques before increasing the metronome tempo.
That’s all for now!
In the next lesson I’ll show riffs and licks of the second song of my solo album.
Stay tuned
Ciao
