Easy Guitar Riffs

When you’re learning electric guitar it can be tempting to concentrate solely upon learning easy guitar riffs from famous songs and neglect the kind of practice that will truly develop you as a guitar player to a far greater extent. For this reason you should always try to maintain a balance in your electric guitar lessons between having fun with easy guitar riffs and learning more serious things such as modes and exercises to develop your technique. Your ultimate goal should not be to impress friends but rather to achieve the ability to express yourself musically on electric guitar.

For most of us the entire reason we began learning guitar was so we could play that one famous riff above all else. Often rock guitar riffs can act as a kind of catalyst which inspires something deeply powerful and motivational inside to you to learn to play guitar. It’s this desire or spark which ignites that keeps you practicing even though you may be facing things which are very technically challenging to achieve.

Technical facility on guitar is one of the most important things to strive for. With enough technical ability you’ll be able to play basically whatever you want. If your technique is of a sufficient level then you can play whatever is within your current range and it doesn’t require any real practice time at all. All you need to learn are the notes and you can play it practically instantly. Make sure that you are not learning guitar in a way which is backwards either! What I mean by that is you should make a clear distinction, a dividing line between learning electric guitar and playing easy guitar riffs. They are totally separate things.

One of the best ways to find famous guitar riffs to play is on the internet. There are many guitar websites out there offering some pretty cool video lessons and note by note guides on how to play many thousands of guitar riffs. You can also search the free TAB sites where you’ll find hundreds of thousands of submissions from other users about how they play a particular song. Be wary of these however as they are being submitted by everyday users and so there can be a lot of inaccuracies present. Use your own best judgement.

If you really want to get ‘old school’ then try doing it the same way many of today’s current guitar hero’s would have learned - through transcribing things off records by ear. This is enormously difficult to do in the beginning and takes years to get good at however it’s the one thing which will make you an accomplished guitar player. You’ll be developing the ability to play whatever is in your head directly through your guitar, it’s kind of like building a direct line which links the two. Many of today’s greatest guitar players possess this ability simply because they were forced to transcribe from records when growing up and learning guitar. There just wasn’t any other way to learn easy guitar riffs!

Using YouTube is probably the most accessible and immediate way to learn easy electric guitar riffs. You’ll also find that many of the more professional websites will put up sample lessons here to show off and advertise their lessons. What’s most important is that if you are going to put the effort into learning easy guitar riffs then try as best you can to learn them accurately.