Description
This is the first riff. As you can see by the tabs the riff is composed of a lot of string skipping between 2 strings.
Let's look at the first bar.
place your hand so that your index is over the 4th fret of the 5th string. This is where the first two bars will be played. Look at the video now. As you can see my hand always goes back in this position until the end of the fourth bar where we go up the scale to the same notes, only an octave higher.
There are two spots in this riff that can be tricky. First one is the triplets and the end of the fourth bar. That section is faster than the rest of the riff and is meant to shift your hand towards the next octave. You might have to isolate it from the rest of the riff first and work on it by itself. Play it slowing with a metronome if you have trouble playing it at normal speed. Take patterns 1 and practice it alone for a while.
The other tricky part is on the fifth bar you will have to use your pinky to do the slide from the 9th to 10th fret. You could always use your ring finger to do it but I prefer the pinky as it is less of a stretch and less movement.
Now about the picking hand. If you look at the video you will see that the central position of my pick is often between the strings. Since I have to play back and forth between two strings I'll try as much as possible to be in-between them so that I can hit the fifth string with an upstroke and the 4th string with a downstroke. This is meant to lessen the pick movement. Less movement, more speed.
All thru the riff I apply palm muting to the highest string of the bar. So for the first 3 bars I'll apply palm muting to the 5th string the on the 4th bar I apply it to the 6th string. The same goes for the next four bar, I apply the palm muting to the highest string. I will also apply heavy palm muting on the triplets.
Lesson Info
