Record it

Your riff exists in your hands and nowhere else. Today it becomes a thing: a recording you can play for someone, keep, and in six months, grin at. Recording is also the best teacher you have, because the microphone hears what your hands are too busy to notice.

Set up the beat

Recording without a beat is how timing problems hide. Pick a tempo where the two-bar phrase feels comfortable, not heroic, somewhere around 80 to 90 bpm is a common home for a riff like this, and put a pulse under yourself:

• A metronome (any free app): brutally honest, zero atmosphere.
• A drum loop (any free drum-machine app, or search “80 bpm rock drum loop”): more forgiving to the ear, much more fun to play against.

Either is fine. Play it from a different device than the one recording, so the beat and the guitar end up on the take together.

Set up the recorder

Your phone’s voice-memo app is genuinely good enough, this is a sketch, not an album. Place it about an arm’s length away, pointed at the guitar (or the amp, if you’re plugged in). Do a five-second test: play your loudest power chord, listen back, and if it crackles or distorts, move the phone farther away. That’s the whole soundcheck.

The take

The take, start to finish:

  1. Start the beat.
  2. Hit record.
  3. Four counts of beat, just breathe.
  4. Riff + answer phrase, looped 4 times.
  5. Stop. Do not judge yet.

One rule, same as any performance: no stopping mid-take. A flubbed note stays in and you keep going. Four loops is short on purpose, long enough to prove the riff holds up, short enough to do again without dread.

Listen back

Listen to the take twice, with one job each time:

1. Timing only. Do your notes land with the beat? Almost everyone rushes, excitement pushes the riff ahead of the drums, especially the fast double-hits. Dragging is rarer but happens on the power chords.
2. Sound only. Are the palm mutes even, or do some chunk and some ring? Any buzzing notes? Does the answer phrase actually sound heavier than the riff?

Then answer your tutor’s two questions honestly: how does it sound, and what’s the one thing you’d change? One thing. Naming one fixable thing is a skill; naming ten is just mean to yourself.

One revision pass, then keep it

Change the one thing, slow the tempo five clicks, soften the mutes, swap the note that bugs you, and record take two the same way. Pick the winner, name the file so you can find it again (riff name plus date beats “New Recording 47”), and confirm it’s saved.

That file is the point of the whole course. You imagined a piece of music, built it, and fixed it in a form that outlasts the moment, which, your tutor notes, is the single most human thing Earth musicians do. Keep the take. Future you is already curious about it.