Write Great Guitar Riffs

The thing to keep in mind when writing a riff, is that the rhythmic phrase you created should be representative of a chord. What I mean is you should be clearly playing to one particular tonal center with your root.The best way to achieve this is to pick a key to write your song in. For this example, we'll use the Key of "A".

Lets say the chord progression we have in mind for our song is a typical rock or blues I-IV-VSo, our chords go A5 -D5-E5 (if you aren't familiar with 5 chords you may want to check out my lesson on Power ChordsLet's assume we want our progression to be 4bars-A5, 1bar-D5, 1bar-E5, then repeat.The idea we want to work with is to replace our A5 chord with a riff. Let's use the minor pentatonic scale to create the riff. If the riff is going to represent the A5 chord well, we have to make sure that we favor the A note.

A good idea is to start and/or end on our root note.(A) It doesn't hurt to play the A note repeatedly in a catchy rhythmic fashion before moving on to any other notes in the scale.If you can come up with a 4 bar riff great! Then play your 1 bar of D5, 1 bar of E5 and go back to your riff. That's it! You've got the next big rock hit on your hands.I know what you're thinking, "But, I can't come up with a riff that's 4 bars long!"No problem.

Let's say your riff is one bar in duration. All you need to do is play your one bar riff-one bar of A5-repeat your one bar riff-one bar A5-then on to ! bar D5-1 bar E5....and repeat....etc....Now you're really rockin'!