Top 35 Riffs Quotes

It’s always a pleasure when you can compose guitar parts from a strong vocal and not just put the melody on top of guitar riffs.

All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.

‘Kraken’ is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it’s more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It’s London as a kind of fantasy kingdom.

I think the best riffs and the best songs come when you’re jamming and having a good time.

Y’know, you can sit in a room, practise all day, learn your scales and blaze blues riffs: it’s easy to hide behind that. But I think with the slide, it’s a little bit tougher.

During our first year, we were playing Priest and Maiden cover tunes all the time while we figured out what we wanted to do as a band. At the time I was getting out of metal and into punk. That’s how Slayer’s sound came together – it’s the speed of punk combined with the big riffs of metal.

I think Pantera is a type of band that has been documented very, very well over the years. With the past re-releases, we were fortunate enough to have old demos and stuff that never really saw the light of day. But Pantera was not the type of band to waste many riffs or many parts or songs.

I’m always working on new songs. With the technology these days, any idiot can record on Pro Tools on your laptop. All you have to do is plug a microphone into the input jack and anybody can have their own recording studio. So I’m always down in my basement, singing along to riffs or whoever I’m collaborating with.

Using string bends instead of just playing regular, unbent notes can definitely help give certain riffs a cooler, heavier edge.

That’s all life is, I guess. Just a bunch of riffs. Look at me: I’m wearing a tie. Why am I wearing a tie? It’s because I saw an adult wear a tie and I thought, Oh, that’s what people do. We’re all just trying to be what an adult is.

I play and I’ve played in heavy bands, but when I write for myself, I don’t particularly feel like writing huge rock riffs. It just doesn’t work for me and my voice.

I really don’t have an ear for pitch. I can’t sing at all, I can’t hum melodies and I can’t write riffs.

We treated ‘Psychosis’ like a labor of love from the beginning, from the selection of riffs – I spent like a month just doing riffs for the record.

I would listen to Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry, and I would listen to how they played their riffs, and after I taught myself that, I taught myself to play my own kind of stuff.

Hendrix was the bass player for Little Richard. We were both left-handed, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. In fact he used to say, and this is documented, ‘I patterned my style after Dick Dale.’

If I sit down with an electric guitar, what’s going to come out are Sabbath/Zeppelin type riffs, but if I’m sitting behind a piano late at night, I might write something like ‘Desperado.’ You’re not going to write ‘Desperado’ between a wall of Marshalls and thumping, crushing volume.

Words can have the same kind of magic as riffs can.

I play guitar and I’m always trying to find out the latest kinds of riffs.

The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the Forties and Sixties, the cultural and political desires for self-determination began to shape each other in a series of riffs on independence and identity.

If I get even five per cent of my ideas out and documented before I die, I’ll be lucky. I’m not in danger of running out of riffs or ideas anytime soon. They overwhelm me and it’s hard to find time to deal with them.

Man, don’t get me started on Pat Travers. That dude writes killer blues rock and roll riffs.

We have to remember the bigger picture: the U.S.-Israel alliance is too important to be hijacked by political interests or undermined by perceived riffs.

Motley never once sat down and said, ‘Well, the music scene’s changing. We need to make this record a little darker or heavier musically or lyrically.’ It was just four guys sitting in a room like a bunch of 16-year-olds in a garage and jamming on riffs.

There’s such a huge difference between a great arrangement of riffs and a song. Sometimes the two can be the same. But the difference is a song doesn’t necessarily need a riff, whereas a riff doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got a good song on your hands.

I started learning everybody’s riffs, from Donny Hathaway to Jeffrey Osborne to James Ingram. That helped me create my own style of singing.

I’ve always been interested in shaping music in odd ways, with odd riffs and that’s been probably something that I’ve continued on with my studies with improvisation as I’m working with people.

If I pick up a guitar, I don’t practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven’t done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It’s not like the music I’m doing is just a single thread.

As much as I love heavy riffs, I like The Eagles, Neil Young, Elton John, Crowded House.

I had a diary full of lyrics and whatnot and a little voice recorder of guitar riffs.

My biggest influences were 1980s punk and metal. Metallica were my biggest influence because they were good at everything – riffs, energy – but with such an ear for melody, it was hard not to get pulled into it and become a fanatic.

I’ve got so much material; like, it feels as if every day I’m coming up with so many riffs.

The way that we imitate each others’ riffs is something that other bands don’t do as much. If we’re jamming with a jazz band, or I am jamming with a jazz band, I have to catch myself, the tendency is always to do that.

There are no leftover Tool songs because of the process it takes to compose our songs – the way we hash it out in a room with all three or four of us, that there’s tons of riffs and jams and things. But there’s no put-together songs that are sitting in the eaves.

Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.