How to Play Classic Guitar Riff from Judas Priest’s Pain Killer

Hey guys,

Here´s the classic guitar riff from the song Painkiller by Judas Priest!

Have fun…

How’s it going, guys? John McClennan here with guitarcontrol.com, excited to bring you this lesson. We’re looking at some Eric Johnson inspired chord voicings here.

I’ve discovered from some of his lines that he does things like…kind of little riffs based off this three-note chord. So if you can solo with that you can also just play that rhythmically as well. So let’s go through the shapes. We’re going to go through all the chords and I’m going to apply them in the key of F. So click the link below so you can get the tab and follow along. But here we go.

One, 3, 2, that’s F major; G minor become 3, 5, 3. Then I move that up a whole step for A minor; B flat, which will be the same as the 1st chord. And then C is up a whole step and then the D minor is 10, 12, 10. And then E diminished you can play 12, 13, 12. And then that would resolve to this chord up the octave, which would be 13, 15, 14.

Now, one of the things that’s cool is you can of course play this ascending and then descending. And then you can arpeggiate them, like “The Way I Was” or you can also work on your muting. I love that sound. It’s just so fat. It’s like you’re only playing three notes as opposed to if you think of like your C chord or something where you’re playing so many notes, all six strings. But here you cut that in half and it almost sounds bigger. You know what I mean? So this is something, this style of chord voicing is used in a ton of rhythm playing anyway, which we’ve discussed.

Let’s go through the chord scale one more time. So you’ve got F, G minor, A minor, B flat, C, D minor, E minor 7 flat 5 or diminished, F major. Back down.

All right, click the link below and we’ll see you next time. Thanks for watching.

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