Learn to play three fun and easy riffs by George Thorogood And The Destroyers with Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman, aka Uncle D. Be sure to get the free tabs to go along with the video instruction and you will be rockin’ these classic George Thorogood riffs in record time. No slide required!
Introduction
How’s it going everybody this is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson and today I’ve got three fun and easy riffs for you from George Thorogood and The Destroyers.
Right now Guitar Control is giving away this really cool chord chart. It’s a free download with every chord that you could ever need all neatly compiled into one sheet. It’s in PDF format so you can download it, print it off, throw it in your gig bag, put it where you practice so you can have any chord that you ever need, in whatever given situation at a glance and it’s a free download.
So be sure to click on the link in the description for the tab so let’s get close up and take a look at these.
George Thorogood Riff-1 – Who Do You Love
All right so the first George Thorogood riff we’re going to look at is a riff from Who Do You Love. So this is all just based off of an E major chord for the most part and it’s got this kind of a swing thing to it… So here where on the downbeat of one and we play just the E string and the A string, so if you just have your fingers down for an E major chord; so I’m on the second fret of the A string with my second finger, the second fret of the D string with my third finger and the first fret of the G string with my first finger and then the rest of the strings are open even though we’re not playing all of the strings. So on the downbeat of one we hit just the E string and the A string and then on the and of one we hit the D string; so it’s like one and, and then on the downbeat of two it’s the low E string and on the and of two the D string again… then on the downbeat of three we rest and on the and of three you get just the D and the G string and then for beat four the low end of the chord again… So the big thing is you kind of want to get that rhythm. Any note that you hit is part of the chord, it’s going to be in key, you want to try to hit these as accurately as you can, but it’s like really, really difficult to do that consistently, to just hit those strings. So the second measure is still off of with the E; one and, two, three four and… Then the third measure is pretty similar to the first measure… Now on the fourth measure this is where we have like the only big change… and then on the downbeat of three we need to get an A so you just keep your fingers for this and just take your pinky and just put it in here so it’s picking up the second fret of the G string and the B string and we hit that on beat two, beat three is an E, four and, two open strings…
George Thorogood Riff-2 – Get A Haircut
All right so the next George Thorogood riff we’ll look at is the riff from Get A Haircut. So this is just like kind of a typical blues shuffle kind of a thing that you maybe you’ve played before. So we’re going to start off here, we’ve got G5; so I’m on the third fret of the low E string with my first finger and then how I like to do it is you have to get the fifth fret of the of the A string, so I do it between my first and second finger because then you have to alternate between on the A string between the fifth fret and the seventh fret, but still keep this G here; so for me it’s harder to do this stretch between my third finger and fourth finger, it’s easier to do it this way, so whichever way is more comfortable for you, one isn’t necessarily better than the other. So with this we’re going to start off with the G5 and then when we put this finger down, it’s actually E minor over G (Em/G); so we’ve got one and, two and, three and, four and. So the and of two is a rest and then on the and of four is the D string and the G string open and that’s our first measure; one and, two and, three and, four and… Okay and then starting on the second measure we rest on the downbeat of one and then on the and of one it’s the G5, the downbeat of two is the Em/G and then we rest on the and of two and then the last two beats are just like the last two beats of the first measure…
George Thorogood Riff-3 – Bad To The Bone
All right then the last George Thorogood riff to look at is the riff from Bad To The Bone. Now this is actually supposed to be played with a slide, but you can play this riff without the slide and it still sounds really good because it’s all just based around the D string and G string. So if you’re playing the same fret or those two strings open together you get that cool fourth interval and it sounds very similar if you do it with a slide or if you’re doing with your fingers. So this is weird because it’s in 12/8, so we’re going to rest and then on the last eighth note the D string and G string are open and then the fifth fret of the D string and G string; so I’m just going to use my first finger and then back to the open… Then we’re going to come down to the second fret and we’re going to do a slide from the second fret to the third fret, but we want it to be the like the slide from nowhere, so it’s like we don’t want… we want that simultaneous slide and then that’s the first measure. And then the second measure downbeat of one, well all of beat one is just the open D string and G string and now we rest after that two beats and then plus an eighth note and then so the last part of the second measure is the same as the first one… and that just repeats… So there’s really not a whole lot of those parts and if you want to do some of the other kind of like the cool things that let’s come up to the 12th fret again and we’re just playing on the D string and the G string. Now if you are trying to do it with a slide, it’s more or less kind of the same thing, but that’d be a topic for another video.
Conclusion
All right so there you have it, three fun, not too terribly difficult, riffs to play by George Thorogood and the Destroyers. So if you like this Three Fun & Easy Riffs By George Thorogood 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. If you’ve not 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 Three Fun & Easy Riffs By George Thorogood and The Destroyers and have a great day.
