You and your guitar will be in guitar bliss when you learn to play these two killer KISS tunes with Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman. Be sure to get the free tabs to go along with the video instruction and you’ll be rockin’ these classics tonight!
Introduction
Hey everybody how’s it going? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson and today I want to show you how to play two cool riffs from KISS. So if you’ve spent any amount of time following me you already know that I’m a huge kiss fan; especially the really early material. I think a lot of is just really cool and one of these riffs that I showed you today is one of my all-time favorite KISS riffs. So be sure to click on the link in description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look.
KISS Riff-1 Mr. Speed
All right so the first one we’re going to look at is the riff from the song Mr. Speed. So this is the intro and then it’s also part of the chorus and it’s a cool kind of a bluesy little riff. So we’re gonna start off here playing this E5 chord, but we’re just playing up here, so I’m on the ninth fret of the D string and G string with my first finger… So we start off we hit this and this is on the and of four and then it’s tied to the downbeat of one of the next measure; so it’s like and one, and then on the and of one you hit it again. Then we’re going to take your third finger and put it on the 11th fret of the G string and you’re going to pick that and you’re going to slide from the 11th fret to the 13th fret and then take your second finger and drop it onto the 12th fret of the B string… Then we’re going to take that shape and move it down a whole step so now we’re at the 10th fret of the B string with my second finger and the 11th fret of the G string with my third finger and then follow that by barring at the ninth fret on the G and B string and then we’re just going to move that down a whole step and repeat basically the same thing; so now we’re barring the seventh fret of the D and the G strings and we’re going to go to the ninth fret of the G string and slide to the 11th fret and then drop our second finger here onto the 10th fret of the B string then move that down a whole step so your second finger ends up on the eighth fret of the B string and your third finger on the ninth fret of the G string and then ending it with your first finger barring the seventh fret of the G and the B strings… Then after that we’re going to come down to the second fret and you’re going to barre your first finger on the second fret of the D and the G strings and we’re gonna hit that twice and then take your third finger and barre it across the D and G string at the fourth fret and we’re gonna pick that and bend and release. So actually I skipped a whole part in there so we come down to the second fret barre your first finger across the D and G strings and then take your third finger and barre it across the D and G strings at the fourth fret and back to the second; so two, four, two, back to four and we’re gonna do a bend and release and then end on the second fret… Then we’re going to move that up a whole step and do the same thing so now we’re at the fourth and the sixth fret and then the whole thing would just repeat…
KISS Riff-2 Detroit Rock City
All right so next we’re going to look at Detroit Rock City, the intro/main recognizable riff from this. Now this is played on two guitars and it’s a harmony so what I’m going to do is I’m going to just kind of show you the way that I do it if I’m playing it by myself to kind of cover that. So guitar one starts first finger on the second fret of the A string and then third finger on the fourth fret and we pick two to four; so it’s like one and two and three and four and, and there’s two measures of that. Okay now at this point on the recording this guitar would continue to play that and then a second guitar would come in and play here play on the fourth and sixth frets on the D string so you get this harmony in fifths. So how I do it I just move my first finger up to the fourth fret and I barre the fourth fret of the A and the D strings and then put my third finger onto the sixth fret of the D string… then we’re going to stay on that chord; triple it, triple it, so it’s like one yellow, two yellow, three and then on the downbeat of four we just hit an E5 power chord here on the second fret of the A string of my first finger and the lowest string is open. Then I go to an A5 so I just move straight up so now the A string is open and I’m on the second fret of the D string. Now if you look on your transcription you’ll see that that is that’s on the and of four, but it’s tied to the downbeat of the next measure, which is a whole note so it just rings out for those four beats plus the first three beats of the next measure. So it’s three, four, one, two, three, four and then we go back to the E5 on the downbeat of four and then on the and of four we hit D5; so first finger on the second fret of the A string and third finger on the fourth fret of the D string and then it just repeats… Okay so when it repeats what I do is I come to the same place here, but what I’m going to do is I’m actually barring my first finger across the D and G strings at the fourth fret with my first finger then my third finger is coming to the sixth fret across the D and G strings… So we’re getting kind of that same harmony, it’s just a different interval, now we’re in fourths…
Conclusion
All right so there you have it, three cool riffs from KISS, that first one from Mr. Speed like I said that is one of my all-time favorite KISS riffs and I just think that’s like really cool. I really like Ace Frehley and he was obviously a big influence on me as a kid and everything but the more I kind of research into stuff it’s like Paul Stanley just did some really cool stuff. He didn’t do a lot of the limelight as the lead guitar player, but he did a lot of really cool stuff and a lot of the really neat solos in old kiss material. So if you like this lesson be sure to give me a thumbs up and leave a comment down below if you have any questions about this or other guitar related topics and let me know what is your favorite classic lineup KISS tune? If you haven’t already done so please subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss any of the content that we upload throughout the week. Well that is all I have for you today. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
