I would like to talk to you about E-minor
heavy metal riffs.
E-minor is probably the most common key for
metal riffs, there are a lot of variations
on it.
You can sneak in a lot of chords that take
it out of the key, but as a foundation, E-minor
is probably the most heard, and the most familiar.
The lowest string, obviously, is E, and that
makes this a great key for riffing in.
You have your E chord.
This is a good foundation.
Right here, first finger, simple chord, power
chord, E, right.
So, within this area, you have a lot of possibilities.
You can move this around.
Now, it's important to know the E-minor scale
in the open position, because that's a really
good guide for coming up with riffs in E-minor.
So, from the low E string, if you play the
scale, you get this.
O.K., so if you play those as power chords,
you get this.
Alright, you also have these on other sets
of strings.
You should know the E-minor scale just using
the roots of the 6th string.
And, also the 5th string.
Now, it's really important, you have this
position here, on the 7th fret.
That, you can trade off with the low E-string.
From there, you can take that anywhere you
want to go, and do some combination of sliding,
some chugging pattern on the low string.
Check it out.
So there, all I'm doing is alternating between
the low string, the E-chord of the 7th fret,
and just moving my way around the scale with
these chords, alternating between chords and
the low string.
Have some fun with it, and I hope you've enjoyed
this lesson on E-minor heavy metal riffs.
