10 Classic Guitar Riffs That Were Created By Accident
7. Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine
Every guitarist tends to have a field day the first time they discover Drop D tuning. Whereas rock and roll was always based on loud booming chords, this kind of tuning gives you the opportunity to play some of the meatiest riffs imaginable with just one finger on the fretboard. It's a handy tool...even when teaching it like Tom Morello was.
Like any other struggling guitarist, Morello was working as a guitar instructor and was just starting to show one of his students this new tuning. Once he started to show him how to play some blues licks on top of this new tuning, the opening riff for what would become Killing In the Name started to come out soon enough. After a couple of minutes, Morello actually cut the lesson to a halt so he record the riff onto his recorder, saving it for Rage's rehearsals later down the line.
From there, the journey to actually get the rest of the sounds on the record was a creative milestone, as Morello pulled out all of his now signature stops, from using random whammy pedal effects to the DJ scratching sounds to bring that hip hop element to Rage's music. Though Drop D might be considered the easy way to get heavy, this is how you use those heavy elements in a much more tasteful way.