Hello everyone, and welcome to my new Guitar World instructional column. In this series of lessons, I will be sharing and demonstrating some of my approaches to playing seven-string guitar and the various ways I use the instrument to craft the riffs that I write for my band, Spiritbox.
I’d like to kick things off with a look at some of the technical and musical elements I employ in our song Jaded, which we recorded for our 2023 EP, The Fear of Fear.
Article continues belowWhen transposing a tuning like this, some players prefer to think of the notes “normally,” meaning as if their guitar were in drop-A, with the understanding that everything sounds in a lower key.
As shown in Figure 1, I perform the intro riff that begins at 0:22 on my guitar’s bottom four strings, using mostly downstrokes – the only exceptions being the pairs of 16th notes, which I pick down-up.
As you can see, there’s a lot of string-skipping between the 7th string and either the 5th or 4th string. Doing so requires both precision and stamina with the pick hand, and it will take time to build up the accuracy that the riff demands.
I begin high up on the neck, at the 15th fret, and proceed to jump back and forth between high and low notes, with some very wide intervals, which I think creates an interesting, angular melodic contour that “pops” nicely.
Notice that I briefly apply palm-muting (P.M.) to the 16th notes on the open 7th-string, which makes them sound tight and percussive. Also notice, in bars 1, 3, 5 and 7, the long finger slides on the 5th string, from the 8th fret to the 14th, which is another important articulation element of the riff.
So, in addition to all the string-skips, there are a lot of quick position shifts, especially with the octave jumps in bar 9, which make the riff challenging to perform cleanly and consistently.
Figure 2 illustrates the song’s pre-chorus riff (0:59), which is very similar to the intro. There are slight differences between the first ending (bars 7 and 8) and the second ending (bars 9 and 10). Both times, I play strummed octaves on the 7th and 5th strings, again with some sliding and shifting, but notice that I change the order of the notes in the final bar, adding a slight twist to cap off the riff.
When playing both figures, strive for accuracy and economy of movement with the pick hand while also delivering the desired intense, aggressive feel. As with anything, practice it slowly at first, to establish the muscle, visual and auditory memory, then gradually increase the tempo to match that of the recording.
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