Quotes About Riffs

#1. This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.

Lauren Oliver

#2. Some audiences can shake and bang their heads on the stage to riffs all night long, but subtlety is an art that must be mastered if you're going to be remembered.

Robert Plant

#3. There's fifty bands doing my riffs for ever and ever.

Santiago Durango

#4. God is not looking for incredibly high notes, intricate riffs or award winning ad-libbing. God is looking at the heart.

Temi Peters

#5. 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.

James Iha

#6. I'd play whenever I could get my hands on an electric guitar; I was trying to pick up rock'n'roll riffs and electric blues-the latest Muddy Waters. I'd spend hours and hours on the same track, back again, and back again.

Keith Richards

#7. 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.

Ian Anderson

#8. He was switching between classical riffs and the jazz tune, "Body and Soul.

Mitch Albom

#9. Even though there's these songs and whoever the hell put it in the internet, if there's any good riffs in them, we raped the songs and put in the new ones.

Kerry King

#10. 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.

Roscoe Mitchell

#11. 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.

Kathy Acker

#12. Doom is thinking-man's heavy, something you climb into and not only discover the riffs and depth of the music, but also you also climb into yourself and explore the inner environment.

Mike Scheidt

#13. 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.

Mike Gordon

#14. 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.

Corey Taylor

#15. 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.

Phil Anselmo

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

R. Kelly

#17. Tony Iommi - the undisputed king of demonic heavy rock riffs. In this area, no one had never surpassed him.

Ozzy Osbourne

#18. Scotty Moore plays one of the first really amazing riffs in rock history on Heartbreak Hotel with Elvis Presley ... it was dangerous, it scared everybodys parents, which was part of the attraction then - as it still is now ... it totally blindsided me and made me want to get a guitar and do that ...

Roger McGuinn

#19. It's got big riffs and really it's a rock and roll album. I think Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver fans will relate to that

Scott Weiland

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

Karen Elson

#21. 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.

Shamir

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

Scott Ian

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

Steven Tyler

#24. All writers are like bomb-throwers, whether they attack with dense academic prose or jazzy riffs of stream-of-consciousness writing.

Betsy Lerner

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

Zakk Wylde

#26. 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.

Wes Borland

#27. I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.

George Saunders

#28. Every artist learns through imitation, but I rather doubt the aim of these things is artistic development. I assume they're either homages or satiric riffs, and are not intended to be taken too seriously as works in their own right. Otherwise I should be talking to a copyright lawyer.

Bill Watterson

#29. Keith Richards ... was once asked how he came up with all those amazing guitar riffs. His answer? He just starts playing until he makes the right mistake. In other words he's optimistic he will create something good by virtue of getting something "wrong."

Mark Stevenson

#30. Affectors Harmagedon is a solid blast of PROG metal complete with burning solos, odd time signatures, orchestral highlights, and Rock riffs that will tear your head off! Excited that I could be a part of this album!

Jordan Rudess

#31. Interspirituality is the world music of religion; borrowing, fusing, blending and bouncing rhythms and riffs off one another not to create a homogenized spirituality, but to birth a radical new sound embedded in the ancient and timeless silence. This doesn't impact or deepen my life-it is my life.

Rami M. Shapiro

#32. 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.

Jello Biafra

#33. When I was younger I would have told you it was my genius, but now I don't believe that for a second. Music just comes out of you, it flows through, it's weird. If you think about it intellectually, how does someone come up with two hundred riffs over their life time?

Tracii Guns

#34. 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.

Billy Corgan

#35. You can imagine several scenes from Star Wars? The way they looked? For me, that's how music is. Sometimes I'll be developing riffs for songs, just while I'm sitting around and not playing.

Ryan Adams

#36. I want to do some different kind of songs, but say I want to do riffs, but I don't come up with any riffs that I really think are great. Then I can't do a riff album. I'm more of a song, melody person.

Stephen Malkmus

#37. I really wasn't needed ... Just straightening up riffs, that's all. Just two guitarists doing it instead of one.

Jimmy Page

#38. 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.

Zakk Wylde

#39. 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.

Brian Wilson

#40. 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.'

Dick Dale

#41. '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.

China Mieville

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

Stone Gossard

#43. I make make music in my own time, messing around with beats and riffs I write. Always practicing performing in my room most times I probably look like an idiot dancing around haha.

Christina Grimmie

#44. 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.

Patrick Carney

#45. 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.

Will Self

#46. 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.

Corey Taylor

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

J Mascis

#48. Led Zeppelin is just a bunch of stupid idiots who wrote cool riffs.

Chris Cornell

#49. 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.

Joe Perry