Bring the Riff to Life:
A Step-by-Step Guide to Goodbye Yesterday
by Jahred Warkentin
Has your church been worshipping to the new track Goodbye Yesterday from Elevation Rhythm? Have you not been able to nail down that guitar line? You have your overdrive on, but the line still doesn't feel full. Or maybe you are a single worship leader on an acoustic guitar who wants to add the riff to your chording. Either way, we are going to cover that riff that keeps getting stuck in your head and bring it out to your fingers!​
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Main/Verse Riff
The original recording is in Ab, and the guitar player is tuned down a half-step (Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb). One of the bass strings is tuned to the tonic chord (1 in the key). For every note of the riff, we are going to play the open-string root note as a drone. This is the secret to that thick sound on one guitar. Tuned a half-step down and played in Ab it looks like this:
Notice the up-strums as they are an essential part of the sound of the riff.
While this sounds awesome, it is not immediately apparent how we can change keys without re-tuning our entire instrument. But with a little bit of knowledge on the intervallic relationships between adjacent strings and frets, we should be able to take this riff and play it just about anywhere.
For the remainder of this article, we will remain in standard tuning (EADGBe) and grab our trusty capo. Remember that the distance between the 5th and 4th string is the same as the distance between the 6th and 5th and the 4th and 3rd. They are all a Perfect 4th away from each other. This means that without changing the fret positioning/fingering, we can play this riff in three different keys just by jumping strings!
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Key of E
Key of A
Key of D
Now by placing our capo on the first fret and sliding all our fretted notes up one fret, we can move our riff up a semitone.
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Key of F
Key of Bb
Key of Eb
Of course, we can continue to do this by moving our capo higher and higher. Here are the keys available by placing your capo on fret 3.​
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Key of G
Key of C
Key of F
A second possible way to play this riff and keep some of its character with a bit of a different sound is to have the drone string above the riff. In the key of G, it would look like this:​
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Key of G
Watch out not to hit the drone string during the pull-off.
I think this version sounds great with the opposite strumming pattern because the drone is on the opposite side. Try it out both ways and see what fits your context!
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Chorus 2 Riff
The riff for the second chorus can also be played on just two adjacent bass strings and then moved around without changing the shape to fit the key you need. Here are a few examples:
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Key of A
Key of G
Key of C
Acoustic Lead
If you are leading this song on your own with an acoustic guitar, we can throw the riff above the chords. Check out these examples in E, A, D and use a capo to move the key around if needed. In these examples, the riff is always along the top line, so the accented upbeats are very useful to draw attention to them. This also means you will have to mute treble strings (x) with your left hand to make sure the highest ringing string is the one playing the riff.
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Key of E
Key of A
Key of D
This example uses two different D chord shapes. Perfect switching between the chord shapes before throwing the riff between them.
Have a worship song or riff you have been dying to play but just can't seem to get it right? Send it our way and we'll break it down in the easiest way possible. Send your song requests to jahred.warkentin@salvationarmy.ca.