Killing in the Name Guitar Lesson - Rage Against the Machine

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In this Killing in the Name guitar lesson video, I will show you how to play all of the guitar riffs in this massive hard rock hit by Rage Against the Machine.

"Killing in the Name" has become Rage Against the Machine's signature track due in most part to it's infectious guitar riffs.

These riffs are played in Dropped "D" tuning, so be sure to tune your guitar starting the from the 6th string (DADGBE).

There are many cool riffs in the this one and I will take you through them all in the same order that they appear in the song. The only section I will skip (for now) is the guitar solo. As I am sure you already know, Tom Morello's guitar solo uses a whammy pedal the entire time. The pedal is being used to change the pitch of the lead guitar lines by either an octave and 2 octaves. Since I don't have a whammy pedal available at the moment, it would be impossible to make the solo sound like the record.

The solo itself is really fun to play so I would be willing to teach a non-whammy version of it (basically everything he is actually playing on the guitar as heard without the pedal effect) if enough of you guys want to learn it.

The riffs have a very cool and in your face funky quality, with liberal use of fret-hand muting, octaves, bends, tremolo picking and hammer-ons. A couple of them can be a little bit tricky so simply isolated those riffs and practice them by repeating them over and over again in rhythm. Don't worry about playing the entire song until you can confident play each riff on it's own.

Then it will simply be a process of putting it all together into one cohesive unit. Enjoy!

Carl...