 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstop Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and in this video today we're going to learn another classic riff. This is another riff that one of you guys has requested. This is the riff for the track Rock Bottom by the British heavy metal group UFO. This riff dates back to 1974. It's probably one of the earliest examples of a fast heavy metal riff from the early 70s. The riff was played by the guitar player Michael Schenker who's actually a German guitar player but he was playing with a British metal band at that point. So this riff is a really cool riff. It's a lot of fun. Here's the riff in full and then we're going to break it down. All the tones you're hearing in this video are coming from my 1988 Kramer Stryker which is plugged into the Blackstar HT20 Mark II. The HT20 is not running through its own speaker today. I've got it running through an IR of a 4x12 cabinet in a big studio via the Torpedo Capital X from Two Notes. The reason for this is I want a lot of my gain to come from the power amp here. So I actually got the amp on 20 watt mode and the master volume is about three quarters of the way up. To get this sound which is that big saturated British rock amp sound I've got the ISF all the way to the British side. Now this is a slightly unconventional tone here because my EQ is actually set to compensate for the fact the amp is pushing the power amp so hard. So my bass is actually on one, the mid is on halfway and the treble is up at nine. So if you're doing this at a lower volume you'll want to add a little bit more bass to compensate because the power tubes will add a lot of low end when they're pushed. The overdrive channel is selected and the gain is just under halfway. So this is quite a quick riff. We're going to be doing a lot of string skipping here and you may have noticed I pretty much downpicked the whole thing. You can alternate pick this riff but if you really want to capture that sense of urgency of the original the downpicking is the way to go. So the riff starts with an open low E string before hitting the seven on the D. Then it's doing the open low E again and the five on the D. That first open is held slightly longer than the second one so there's a little push on that second one. Then I'm playing open once more followed by the six and seven on the A string and the five on the D. Then I'm picking open six seven on the low E string five on the A. Then I'm doing a little quick phrase here now where I'm doing a quick pull off from the seven on the A back to the five hitting the seven on the E I'm playing an open and slow and at speed. The second half of the riff is exactly the same as the first half but instead of coming down to the open E at the end I now go up to the fifth fret on the D string. That fifth fret on the D needs a little quarter tone bend there as well before going back to the open E to loop the riff again. So this riff is two parts that just loop over and over again so here it is slowly. When you're playing this at full speed you can also add some accidental pinch harmonics on some of the notes if you want. That's okay because Schenker does a lot of that in the track naturally. He's not intentionally playing pinch harmonics there but there are a couple of accidental ones just from down picking very aggressively. So like I said the riff is just two main parts it's the same thing twice but the last note is different. So you've heard that slow now here's that one small at full speed. So when you're working on the speed of this riff take your time as you saw their eye down pick the whole thing but if you can't get the speed of the down picking do it with alternate picking just focus on the accuracy of the notes and then go for the speed later on. You don't have to add those sort of accidental pinch harmonics if you don't want to they're just a little bit of fun and something that Michael Schenker does do on the original. What you will notice is if you try and play along with the original it will not quite sound intune so I'm in standard tuning here but the original has actually tuned a quarter tone sharp so it's quite a tricky record to play along with you will need to tune your guitar slightly sharp to get the same pitch as the record. Thank you all so much for watching I hope you've enjoyed this quick lesson on the classic riff for Rockbomb by UFO. If there are any other classic riffs you'd like to see broken down in these videos put them down below in the comments so we can take a look at them. Don't forget to check out the other videos on the Blackstar YouTube channel for more free lessons and other riff breakdowns just like this one and if you're looking for a guitar teacher in your local area please check out musicteacher.com the network of great teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.