Top 136 Riff Quotes & Sayings

I think people will always love a heavy Sabbath riff because it's fundamental to rock.

'Boogie Chillen',' by John Lee Hooker - that is a riff.

But the classic Tenacious D songwriting is Jack or myself will have an idea - I might have a riff - and we'll improv. And once Jack's feeling it, we turn on the tape recorder and start jamming, improv on that riff, improv on those lyrics, and then go back and see if there's anything good in there.

To be a truly conscientious artist, you have to look at what's not working and challenge it. You riff on things.

A riff can take on the aspect of a chorus in a listener's psyche.

'The Cabin at the End of the World' is my riff on the 'home invasion' subgenre of horror/suspense. Hopefully it's a big, loud, dark riff.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

I don't want you to play me a riff that's going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play.

Woodrell's storytelling is as melodic, jangly and energetic as a good banjo riff.... Sammy Barlach's story is a tragedy, but the telling of it is a pleasure.

I could fall asleep at 10:30 watching 'Hill Street Blues.' I might wake up at 1 A.M. and have a riff in my head.

When you have a clear idea of what your character is trying to accomplish, it makes it a lot easier to riff on things.

If you take the riff from the song 'Cowboys From Hell' and really break it down, it's almost a hillbilly guitar riff: dekka dekka dekka dekka dekka dekka dekka dek.

Life is like a great jazz riff. You sense the end the very moment you were wanting it to go on forever.

For me, the music dictates the melody. Give me a riff to sing over, you know?

Every cool riff has already been written by Black Sabbath. You're either playing it faster or slower or backwards, but they wrote it first.

If there is one thing that makes me unique, it's that I riff a lot.

With Rage, we wrote riff rock and had rap vocals, so we didn't really concern ourselves with melody for the most part.

Once you understand that there's a spiritual math, add soul to the science and subtract the riff-raff. 24-7-365, cause 9 to 5 ain't alive.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

After I finished working on the movie, I went back into the show again playing Riff, so it was an incredible time because I loved playing Riff in the theater and, of course, I loved playing Bernardo in the film. We had such a really beautiful time. We knew we were working on something of quality.

When I need to nail that riff to the cross, Marshall will always provide the hammer!

I'll listen to a song so much that ideas start to form out of daydreaming. It's as if I'm reverse-scoring the track and building visuals around a specific beat or riff that's grabbed me.

When you think of rock and roll and metal, a lot of it is based around the riff. If you can sing over the riff and what the arrangements are going to be like, you have to leave space for what most people consider one of the most key essential parts, which is the vocalist.

If you have a good riff with a vocal as well, then it becomes a devastating song. That's why people love riff-rock: it's the ultimate air guitar music.

It was really different this time, because we did everything in the studio and thought out the writing and song structures. Before this album ["The Black Crown"], we used to just write riff after riff and then worry about the rest of it later.

I sleep music. I wake up, and there's a riff in my head. Every step I take, there's a riff, a beat, or something.

I like old-school, riff-driven, hard rock music with big hooks!

I love a good Slash guitar riff. It's sexy!

'I'm Broken' was a sound check riff.

The first riff that I totally mastered was 'Come As You Are' by Nirvana. I remember sitting there, plunking along, I remember thinking 'How do they even do this?'

I've never been known as a riff kind of artist.

You really have to play with the space in a riff so it can be allowed to breathe.

James Hetfield, I mean, the minute he plugs in his guitar and adjusts the tone knob, he comes up with the world's greatest riff.

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.

If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.

Excuse me while I light my spliff, Good God I gotta take a lift, From reality I just cant drift, That's why I'm staying with this riff

I have a tough time with stand-up because I am an improviser. I can riff; I can do crowd work, so I don't prepare.

I've never written jokes. I mean, I'll write things on a piece of paper and riff on them onstage.

I think you can hear the Delta blues thing in something like the intro to 'Heaven in This Hell,' which has that down-home acoustic riff.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

In OK Computer, the guitar was already moving towards a tone generator as well as a riff generator.

I think, visually, 'Moon' probably owes more to the first half of 'Alien' and 'Outland' than it does to '2001.' The character of Gerty is obviously a straight rip-and-riff on HAL.

I saw a band called The Electric Guitars, from Bristol. I described them to Roland, and he just started playing a riff on guitar and said, 'Do they sound like this?' And they did.

To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.

You can have the best riff in the world, but if the drums behind it just ain't vibing it, it's not gonna be the greatest riff, right? So you've gotta have someone there that can really bring that to life.

I was just obsessed with soul singers who had these big powerful voices. I used to listen to Aretha, Whitney, Mariah and try and imitate them, note for note and riff for riff.

Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

Songs are out there - they're waiting to be grabbed. I start with a phrase, musical and lyrical, words like 'I don't think so' and a nice riff. It rolls from there.

Those dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff will see that we're the only chaps who haven't been stultified by the ghastly period of peace.

Joyous Sound evolved from a gospel influence. Actually it evolved out of sitting at a piano and just picking out a riff, a gospel type riff. It just seemed to come joyously-something about the song, about living in another place of joyous sounds. I'm not quite sure-that's one I'm trying to analyze. It just came out.

Just like a comedian has a certain joke or a jazz musician has a riff that they know will get the crowd, a tap dancer always has a step.

I really connect with music that has a point, that's not just a heavy riff and cool sounds. I always like it to have a purpose.

Creating a dance is like coming up with a Chuck Berry riff.

The main riff for 'SandMan' was just something I wrote one night.

I think Batman Returns is right for riffs. I love it but it's the ultimate Tim Burton movie. There is so much that happens that's crazy and there are a ton of things to riff.

When I write a song, it's all about the riff - the riff first, then the words come later.

There's such a huge difference between a great arrangement of riffs and a song. Sometimes the two can be the same. But the difference is a song doesn't necessarily need a riff, whereas a riff doesn't necessarily mean you've got a good song on your hands.

My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.

No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.

It was Scotty Moore's guitar riff [in "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You"] when he was doing The Steve Allen Show that got me into rock music.