Making Riffs

After practicing my chords I’m finally ready to share some riffs I’ve made!

The first uses the following “chord” progression. I quote chord because the middle chord (Dsus) isn’t really a typical chord; it’s just a D played on the A string with its fourth note G.

It’s important to note (pun intended) that the C chord typically has two higher notes but I didn’t play them (for reasons).

Riff 1

Riff 2 Simple

For this riff, I just take the notes of the C chord (C E G) and play them individually. The first riff (of 3) is pretty simple. To spice things up, I play the chord in the order of E G C so that it doesn’t sound like a C chord (the root note of a chord is the lowest note played).

Riff 2 Complex

For this riff, I add some flourishes from the C major scale (which ended up sounding fine) and some dynamic picking to get a sense of rhythm.

As you can hear, my dexterity on guitar stills needs more practice.

Riff 2 Shifted up

For this last riff, it’s the same note progression just played higher up the neck. I was also more successful at making the riff more dynamic.

Progress

After a couple of weeks of learning how chords work, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of how to build chords. Stacking thirds is the simplest way for me to remember how to make chord progressions anywhere on the neck. While this is handy for my understanding, I need to learn and practice chords in their standard, or typical, positions. That is, most chords are played on the first 5 frets. Since some of these chords are rather awkward (below), I’ll need to practice my fingering of them so I can use them confidently.

Also, I’ll need to investigate what the “sus” and “7” mean in relation to chords.

Resources

For creating the chord images I used Chord Generator.

For helping me learn chords I used oolimo.

For image and audio editing I used MS paint and Audacity.

Feature Image

“Bbm ukulele chord” by Ukulele Chords is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0