Now you may be thinking, “I don’t wanna learn alternative stuff, I just wanna shred!” Well, by doing things like this, you can take songs your friends play that are into other forms of music, and totally impress them by making the tunes way cooler.
Anyway, this song uses repeating tune in the background played on some sort of keyboard or synth, and then later the same notes are used to form a riff on piano. That doesn’t matter however, all that matters is the notes used. In this case the riff is a set of 3 arpeggios.
The notes are: “C Eb G” “Bb, D , F” and “F, Ab, C”
These form the chords C minor, Bb major and F minor. Now, the riff in the muse song goes as follows:
For this lesson I’m going to show you an example of how to turn other styles of music into useful licks and riffs for shredding. The example I’m going to use is from an alternative band from Britain called Muse.
A nice slow piano riff, but hardly exciting is it. Well here’s where a little technique called ‘sweep picking’ comes in. See more on the site for how to do the sweep picking, I’m going to do a full video lesson on it soon. Anyway, by playing arpeggios by sweep picking of the chords mentioned above, you get this:
Try look for more arpeggios in other songs and adapt them to shred.
Enjoy….
© Richard Baines 2005
