Top 40 Riffs Quotes

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.

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.

Learning Jimmy Carr riffs off by heart is not the way to anyone‘s heart, unless you‘re Jimmy Carr. And remember, the two most attractive things in a man is a sense of danger and being able to make a girl feel really safe.

‘Master of Reality‘ rules; it’s one of my favorite records of all time. It has some of the most evil riffs on it – and some of the sexiest riffs as well.

Once I started to make the transition to guitar – because I was playing keyboards when we started the band – I was trying to figure out riffs I could play without really having a lot of knowledge. And my dad ended up showing me Black Sabbath‘s ‘Heaven and Hell,’ because he knew I loved Dio.

I use a lot of piano riffs in my production, and someone who I was working with said that I played so good that it sound like Beethoven.

I couldn’t wait to get out of school in junior high to get with Willie Green to pick up some of the riffs he knew.

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

I’ll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can’t underestimate band chemistry.

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.’

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.

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

I play guitar all the time, and I’m constantly thinking of songs… Every time I pick up a guitar, I come up with different riffs, all different bands I’ve been in. Sometimes there is a song or riff that could only belong with Slipknot, and I just can’t use it for anything else, regardless of whatever happened.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

Some of the best rock riffs ever written were by Jimmy Page, and I can’t really name the songs, but some of the stuff he did on his first and second records is beyond brilliant.

To me and my band, guitar riffs are what it’s all about. We know that every time we jam on a great riff, we’ve got a fighting chance of writing a great song!

We always mess around with riffs and stuff and kind of jam out during sound checks, but we never actually started playing covers live until we started goofing off a little bit more on stage.

With guitar riffs, we always look for something that ‘s a little bit special. We’ve always found that it is harder to come up with something that’s nice and simple without getting something that’s hard but easy.

A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don’t write drum riffs first.

Generally my songs are just some riffs slung together as an excuse for a guitar solo.

Riffs are a repeating thing. They come back to you. Some of the things on ‘Back in Black’ were ideas we had knocked around on tracks before that: ‘That bit – maybe we should take a chunk of that and slug it in here.’

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I wrote all my songs on my main instruments, and the songs I would record in my bedroom were just acoustic guitar, mandolin, and sometimes bass. I really like the texture the mandolin added to my music, but my fingers were too big to play it… I could only do little riffs and whatever.

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.

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.

‘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.

My biggest breakthrough was discovering that I could write my own riffs.

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.

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

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.

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.