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Chapter 7: Musical Riffs: Bedrock of the Blues
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nonjudgmental form as the blues. But if you’re mastering all that low-note
stuff, you deserve to see what awaits you when you ascend the cellar stairs
into the sunshine of high-note, melodic-based playing.
Keith Richards’s borrowed trademark:
Quick-four riffs
A quick-four (in this section) refers to a double-stop riff that you play on the
second and third strings within a measure of a I or IV chord. (Don’t get this
quick-four confused with the kind of quick-four that happens in bar two of a
12-bar blues; I cover that version in Chapter 6.) When you play this riff during
a chord, you create a temporary IV chord.
The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards carved out a very successful career
exploiting this riff, and he learned from the great American blues masters.
Figure 7-11 shows a four-bar phrase where the quick-four riff is applied at the
end of each bar of an E and A chord.
Keith Richards’s signature riffs in Stones classics like “Brown Sugar,” “Honky-
Tonk Women,” and “Start Me Up” are actually in open-G tuning, which makes
the quick-four easy to access. Open tunings in G, A, D, and E were used extensively
by prewar acoustic guitarists — such as Charlie Patton, Son House,
and Robert Johnson — especially for slide.
Intro, turnaround, and ending riffs
Intros, turnarounds, and ending riffs fill out the chord structure with melodic
figures. As you play the figures in this section, try to hear the underlying
structure — the rhythm guitar in your mind — playing along with you. You
can play the chords according to the chord symbols above the music, but in
this case the symbols identify the overall harmony and don’t tell you what to
actually play at that moment.
Track 35
Shuffle (qr=qce)
E
Figure 7-11:
The quickfour
move
over openposition
E
and A
chords.
T
A
B
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 2 0 0 0 2 0
1 1 2 0 1 1 2 0
2 2 2 0 2 2 2 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 2 0 0 0 2 0
1 1 2 0 1 1 2 0
2 2 2 0 2 2 2 0
A
0 0 2 0 0 0 2 0
2 2 3 0 2 2 3 0
2 2 2 0 2 2 2 0
2 2 0 0 2 2 0 0
TEAM LinG