The best of riffer madness

Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player – with full audio examples and backing tracks

TODAY I'D LIKE to talk about downpicking — picking or strumming consecutive downstrokes — and why it can be so musically effective. This is something I learned from studying the riff-writing style of

ONE OF MY biggest musical influences is the king of blues power, Albert King. There are so many things that define his unique approach to playing, and I think about these things every time I pick up m

TETRARCH’S CO-FOUNDING GUITARISTS — Diamond Rowe and Josh Fore — started making music together nearly 20 years ago when they were still middle-school kids in Atlanta. Over the years, they’ve developed

From his early days in the repair shop to heading up one of the world’s leading pickup brands, the master pickup maker tells us how his problem-solving mindset led to him working with some of the biggest names in the biz, and why he humbly still seems himself as “crew”

OVER THE LAST two columns, I’ve demonstrated a handful of what I consider to be essential “blues approved” licks that work well both as embellishments to rhythm parts or as phrases within a solo. Our