bernth
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#64: Why Your Riffs Sound Boring & How To Change That! | Metal Music Theory #1
🕑 Added 2020-03-08 14:01:00 +0000 UTCTime for metal music theory - episode one! This is one of the topics the Gold and Platinum members voted for and I'm happy to hear about the interest in music theory :) That's something that is very often neglected in rock and metal music.
For the first episode we will check out how to work with cadences in metal riffs. I'm borrowing and changing some notes to come up with a cool riff in E minor - hopefully my thought process here will inspire you to come up with interesting riffs yourself!
Not all riffs have to be written that way but sometimes it's very helpful to have that harmonic structure to rely on. Know the feeling of searching for that one chord you have in your mind for that nice chorus riff? You will probably find it on a certain scale degree.
I will feature metal music theory in the monthly votings from now on, let me know if you want episode 2 next month :)
Comments
Pedro Ernesto
nem ferrando cara, tu é o meu ídolo da programacao
Erick Wendel
Omg, it looks simple playing but sounds amazing! Thank you so much!!
Bernd Brodträger
Hey Brian, thanks so much for taking the time to share that! Blocking the strings like that makes a lot of sense, that's some great input. Overlapping and ringing notes can really mess up your sound with distorted riffs and it's important to work on that :) This kind of muting has strangely just evolved with my playing over time, I don't know how it works for other players and if somebody out there has worked on this with actual exercises! I'm very analytical when it comes to technique but the correct muting of different shapes (also arpeggios when sweeping) came by repeating challenging sections over and over again, it got better over time. The great thing is that you don't have to work on it with every single shape, once your hands figure it out you can adapt it to almost anything. It would be great to hear more input on that from the community, that's a really interesting topic I didn't think about too much until now!
Brian Fox
Good stuff, Bernth; thanks! Especially liked the diminished chord jabs. Interesting you mentioned the Em key as being a popular metal key. I've been learning Judas Priest's "Green Manilishi" recently (also in Em :-) . Hey, one trick I've used to get a really tight Em chord sound in that first position (?) is to place my fingers as if to play an E (major) chord (i.e. index @ G1; middle @ A2; ring @ D2), but just mute the G string with my index finger. You are accurate at hitting 2-note chords, but I've found this trick hides any overstrums, but also actually sounds great even if you strum all strings. Can you recommend any tricks like this for muting other types of chords for maximum impact / tone-age? Thank you, sir.
