Hey everyone! This was my last week of introducing a new topic to learn as part of my learning journey. This week I tackled riffs! I honestly LOVED this week’s topic and had fun trying out different riffs. A riff is a short musical phrase that is a repetitive rhythmic figure. I remember when I was younger, my brother always played the ‘Seven Nation Army’ riff by The White Stripes, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I definitely thought riffs were going to be harder to learn, and the more advanced ones will be, but the beginner ones I started with actually weren’t bad.

To start the riff learning process, I looked on youtube and just searched ‘beginner guitar riffs.’ I watched the first video that popped up and honestly found it helpful. The creator just quickly went over three beginner rock guitar riffs, and I just followed along. Each riff went shockingly smoothly to grasp after a couple of times going over it. I was literally ecstatic when I played the first one clearly, I felt my learning had paid off, and I actually knew how to play something. The 3 riffs in the video by @music-ian were, “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, and “Guerilla Radio” by Rage Against the Machine. I had heard the first two before, but I was unfamiliar with the “Guerilla Radio” one. After learning those 3, I browsed through more videos to find other beginner riffs I wanted to try out.

I ended up finding a video by @MartyMusic. I’d actually used Marty’s videos in a previous week to learn strumming. In Marty’s video, he went over 5 different riffs, with 3 of them different from the first video. The new ones introduced were “TNT” by ACDC, “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, and “Dirty Deeds” by ACDC. I found all five riffs went relatively smoothly to learn; this was definitely one of my favorite things I’ve learned to do on the guitar.

I am very proud of myself this week, and I know I wouldn’t have been able to learn each of these as easily as I did without all I’ve learned in the past weeks of this journey. It’s a good feeling to know all my hard work is paying off and actually have pleasant sounds coming out of the guitar.