How To Be Creative On The Guitar By Using Guitar Double Stop Riffs In Your Playing

Double stops are a very cool sounding guitar riff idea that you will be able to apply to your acoustic guitar soloing time and time again. Put simply, a double stop is a guitar term used for playing two notes at the same time. They are a great tool to expand your creativity on the guitar and can be used in all styles including blues, rock, country, jazz, metal and more.

Double stops will enhance your acoustic guitar riffs and playing in general. They will open up the whole fretboard to you instantly and take your creativity on the guitar to a whole new level.

Double stops can be played on adjacent strings and non adjacent strings. The type I want to show you today exists on the 1st and 3rd strings. When you use this approach with your guitar riffs, we call it playing in 6th’s, because the distance between the notes of the double stop are a 6th apart. If this is not clear to you, there is no need to worry as you will still be able to create some very cool acoustic guitar riffs with this idea.

Check out the diagram to the right, to see how these look on the neck of the guitar in the key of G Major. I have grouped together the notes you should play together by color. As you can see, your guitar creativity will explode when you apply this idea as the whole neck is opened up to you. You are playing horizontally rather than vertically, as you do with a scale, and this will create some very cool riffs on your acoustic guitar.

How To Practice Double Stops For Maximum Creativity In Your Guitar Playing

There are many cool guitar riffs you can create with double stops, but first we need to get them into your fingers. You can either play the notes of your double stops together, or separately. It is also important to note the fingering used for these double stops. In general it is best to keep the second finger on the 3rd string at all times and alternate between the first and third fingers on the 1st string depending on the double stop you are playing. This keeps the fingering nice and efficient and will make playing your guitar riffs with this approach much easier.

Here they are together:

Here they are separately with the lowest note of each double stop played first:

Here they are separately with highest note of each double stop played first:

Here they are separately alternating between lowest and highest notes played first:

Here they are separately alternating between highest and lowest notes played first:

As you can see, there are many ways to play and be creative on your guitar with these double stops. You should work thoroughly on each approach above to really get them into your fingers so that they can then become part of your everyday riff playing on the acoustic guitar.

Creating Double Stop Guitar Riffs

Below are some double stop riff ideas that will give your guitar creativity that boost it needs. While the riffs below are cool on their own, double stops are most effective when combined with other riff ideas. This is where you will here the cool contrast of your riffs and licks along with the double stops.

Here is a double stop riff that targets the G Major Chord:

Here is a double stop riff that targets the C Major Chord:

Here is a double stop riff that targets the D7 Chord:

There are far too many ways you can use these type of double stop riffs to explain in a single email, but using the above ideas will increase your guitar creativity significantly and give you some cool ideas to inject into your acoustic guitar riff playing.

As always, look for this type of playing in existing songs to learn further. Here are a couple of songs I will leave you with, that you will find these types of double stops being used:

• Intro to Wanted Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi

• Intro to Fortunate Son - Creedence Clear Water Revival

• Intro Solo in Patience - Guns N’ Roses

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