When you’re learning to play guitar you practice chords, strumming patterns, fingerpicking patterns, guitar songs and scales in order to become an an accomplished guitar player. That stuff can be hard and challenging sometimes so it’s healthy for you to take a pleasant break now and then. That’s where easy guitar riffs and intros come in.

Indulging in the best and easiest guitar riffs is good for the soul. It’s motivating and will keep the fun alive while working on your regular practice workout.

What is a guitar riff?

A guitar riff is a memorable sequence of notes or chords that has a main part in the song. It has a strong melodic or harmonic pattern that is used as a repeated catchy hook and makes the music stand out. Riffs can be found in all styles of music from rock to latin all the way to classical music.

While riffs are usually short in duration, there are examples of longer riffs and they can differ in complexity from really simple to super challenging riffs.

How to practice a guitar riff

Before you start practicing a guitar riff you want to listen to the riff a couple of times. Put on the original track and carefully listen to the notes (the melody or harmony), to the duration of the notes, the beat, the rhythm, the tempo, the timing of the notes, any dynamics or accents of the notes in the riff.

Analyze the riff with your ears in anyway possible. This is a really important process and skill to learn and gives you a great advantage before you really start learning any riff on the guitar.

Once you’ve listened and analyzed the riff you look for the Tabs (see the easy guitar tabs list below) and try to figure out the riff note by note. I recommend you first try to figure out the riff using only the tabs and your ears and when you’re stuck you watch a video guitar lesson. Trying to work out the riff on your own is so good for developing and improving your guitar skills, it’s huge!

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