Riff

A riff is a short, catchy figure, usually one or two bars long, that repeats again and again and holds a song together. Riffs are the signature of rock, blues, funk and metal, and they have a long history in jazz. Often a riff is the first thing you hear in a song, and the part everyone wants to learn when they pick up a guitar or a bass.

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What makes a riff

• It is short, so it can loop.
• Its rhythm is strong. Rests, syncopations and accents matter as much as the pitches.
• It uses few notes, very often from the minor pentatonic or blues scale, circling around the tonic. Many guitar riffs sit in E or A, where the low open strings can ring.
• It repeats, with small changes. The last time through, a riff often bends its ending to lead into the next section, as in bar 3 of the example.

Riff, ostinato, lick and hook

• An ostinato is the classical word for any persistently repeated pattern; a riff is a kind of ostinato.
• A lick is a short stock phrase used in a solo. Players collect licks as vocabulary, but a lick is not repeated as a song's backbone.
• A hook is whatever part of a song you remember most. A great riff is often the hook.

In the swing era, big bands built whole arrangements from riffs: short figures tossed between the horn sections behind a soloist.

Learning a riff

Learn the rhythm first: clap it or tap it until it feels natural, then add the notes. Practice it slowly with a metronome or a drum loop, and only speed up once it grooves. A riff that is rhythmically tight at a slow tempo sounds better than a fast, ragged one. For the scales most riffs come from, see The Pentatonic & Blues Scales.