Two fingers, one shape, five places on the neck: that is the whole main riff of "Iron Man", and the four musicians from Aston who put it on Paranoid, released by Vertigo on 18 September 1970, were Black Sabbath. The riff moves one power chord shape through five positions: B, D, E, G and F sharp. Easy metal riffs are not the shallow end of the style. They are the part that carries the load.
A deckhand hauling on a four-part tackle raises four times the load his arms could lift alone, the rope paying out through the sheaves of two wooden blocks in long unhurried pulls while a loaded cargo net climbs off the quay, and an easy riff trades on the same advantage: a figure any beginner can finger in a first week, fed through a distorted amplifier until two fingers hoist the weight of an arena. The blocks do the lifting.
Cranked that way, a riff of three or four notes knocks the cups off the draining board in the flat upstairs and smashes them on the lino as thoroughly as any virtuoso passage on record, and it manages it precisely because it asks nothing of the fretting hand and everything of the volume knob, the picking hand and the nerve to strike the same string forty times without flinching. Beginners learn it in an afternoon. Crowds have been singing it back for fifty-six years.
The physics of the power chord, and where it sits in the story, belong to the theory of the style. The hands need only three skills, and each riff here drills one of them: the open low string, the two-finger shape, and a picking hand that keeps time.
Easy metal riffs on the open low string
The lowest string on the guitar, left open and struck hard, is the cheapest heavy note there is. No finger touches it, nothing on it can buzz, nothing can be missed. Released by Megaforce on 25 July 1983, Kill 'Em All carried "Seek & Destroy", whose main riff keeps dropping back onto that open E between short climbs on the A string, and the Bay Area four who built a whole debut out of figures a teenager could copy by ear were Metallica. It has been set as a first lesson ever since, and it has never once needed simplifying.
Nine years later the same open string climbed the American chart. The Los Angeles band that slowed thrash down to a march and sold more records doing it than ever before was Megadeth. Released by Capitol on 14 July 1992, Countdown to Extinction put "Symphony of Destruction" second in its running order, a riff that is little more than the open low E chugged in steady eighths with a short climb of power chords at the end of each bar. The album reached number two on the Billboard 200, the American album chart, held off the top by Billy Ray Cyrus's Some Gave All.
The Birmingham five whose most famous riff rings mostly on open strings were Judas Priest, and "Breaking the Law", from British Steel in April 1980, opens on a low, simple riff picked one note at a time, the fretting hand barely moving while the open strings do the ringing. It takes a morning to learn. Playing it as cleanly as K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton did takes a year.
Two fingers and the whole neck
The second skill is the power chord, and it asks for exactly two fingers, the first on a note on one of the two lowest strings and the third two frets higher on the string beside it. Lock that shape and it travels the neck unchanged. That portability is the whole secret of "Iron Man" and of "Paranoid", and it is why a player who has learned one shape in the evening can play two of the most famous riffs ever recorded before bed. The shape does the thinking. The hand only has to follow it.
The riff of "Iron Man" walks the way a man fords a river on stepping stones, each chord planted on a stone before the next foot comes up, the whole body leaning into a current that turns every step into a decision, and that slow, deliberate tread is exactly what makes it easy: the hand has all the time it needs to carry one shape from position to position. The guitarist who set that pace, and never once saw a reason to hurry it, was Tony Iommi.
"Paranoid", the title song of the same record, runs the opposite way: two shapes, a steady stream of eighth notes moving between E and D shapes, every stroke of the pick coming down, at a speed that locks the forearm before the second verse. It is the first speed exercise in the whole catechism of the style. Nothing about it is difficult except keeping it up.
The Hanover five that carried the palm-muted chug onto American radio went by the name Scorpions, and "Rock You Like a Hurricane", from Love at First Sting in early 1984, sets muted power chords against ringing ones inside a few frets of the bottom of the neck, the muted chords thumping like a fist on a car bonnet and the open ones hanging in the air after it. The single reached number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. A beginner can have the riff in a week.
What the easy riffs teach the hands
| Riff | Band and record | Year | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Iron Man" | Black Sabbath, Paranoid | 1970 | Moving one power chord shape along the neck |
| "Paranoid" | Black Sabbath, Paranoid | 1970 | Downward picking at speed |
| "Breaking the Law" | Judas Priest, British Steel | 1980 | Picking single notes over open strings |
| "Seek & Destroy" | Metallica, Kill 'Em All | 1983 | The open low E as a home note |
| "Rock You Like a Hurricane" | Scorpions, Love at First Sting | 1984 | Muted chords against ringing ones |
| "Symphony of Destruction" | Megadeth, Countdown to Extinction | 1992 | Leaving space between the notes |
The third skill is the picking hand, and it is the one that takes longest, because the notes are already known and only the time is left to learn. Laid lightly across the strings beside the bridge, the edge of the palm turns an open low E from a roar into a dry thud, and the gap between those two sounds is where most of these riffs do their work.
The shape does the thinking. The hand only has to follow it.
A beginner who drills "Paranoid" with every stroke coming down will feel the forearm seize inside a minute, and there is only one cure, the one every thrash guitarist of the eighties took before a single show, which is to keep going through the ache until the forearm stops arguing and the calluses on the fretting fingers harden like horn. Nobody skips that month. The faithful all served it.
"Symphony of Destruction" teaches the rarest skill of the six, which is silence. The gaps between Dave Mustaine's chugs are as fixed as the notes themselves, and a beginner who rushes them turns a march into a stumble down a flight of stairs, every rest swallowed, every chord landing early on the next.
A relentless eight bars of the open E, played at the same volume from the first stroke to the last, will teach the right hand more than a month of scales, because heavy music is judged on the attack of the note rather than the choice of it. Held that way, every downstroke lands like the last one. The riffs are still the best teachers in the room.
From the easy riff to the hard one
Every harder figure in the style grows out of these six. Add a second string and the power chord becomes a riff that moves in two directions at once, add a second guitar a third above and the figure turns into a harmony, add a bar of an odd length and it starts to lurch, and learning how metal riffs are built is simply learning which of those additions a song can carry.
None of them makes the first six obsolete. Fifty-six years on, the riffs a beginner can play by the end of a first month are the same riffs that open the encores at the biggest heavy shows on earth, and most of the players who wrote them, Tony Iommi and K.K. Downing among them, had taught themselves by ear rather than in a classroom. The difficulty was never in the notes. It was in the volume, the timing and the nerve.
