Royal Blood Style

Hi GMC!

Welcome to my new lesson covering a band that every guitarist should hate... a band without guitars?? Is it a rock band?? Unfortunately, the answer is YES! They are a fantastic rock band. Their name is Royal Blood and are an English indie rock duo formed in 2013 by Mike Kerr (Lead vocals and Bass guitar) and Ben Thatcher (Drums).

Music Style:
Their modern style mixes sounds from blues rock, hard rock and garage rock. Their sound is very powerful based on overdriven riffs and really big drum grooves. In some moments I feel that their style mixes elements from White Sripes with Muse, but I can't say that they don't have their own personality.

In this lesson I tried to recreate their style but with the use of my guitar. Mike's way of playing bass is very similar to a guitar player so I think that these riffs will be also very inspiring and cool to play by guitarists.

Tonality, Chord Progression & Scales:
As most of the indie rock bands, their music is based on major and minor tonalities, being the aeolian, mixolydian and ionian their favorites. Each of these modes give a different feel, the first one is rock, the second is blues and the third one add the pop feel. All this mixed set the roots of their music. This composition is in D minor and the use of drop D tuning allows me to use a lot of open string riffing. About chords, I just used some power chords but mostly single string riffs to emulate their music. I added a bass guitar in the backing to make this sound fuller and closer to their mixes. (He combines guitar and bass amps while playing live).

Techniques:
This lesson is mostly based on single string riffs with open strings. It's a very good lesson to traing your rhythm abilities and techniques as alterante picking, palm muting and vibrato.

Sound:
I used LePoin plugins to create the guitar tone. These are free amp emulators that are extremely recommended. The cabinet used for this guitar tone is HyBrit which is a Marshall amp emulation and before it a fuzz emulation by Waves. Check out the settings:




Click HERE to download my Patch.

I used Cubase to record audio and midi, SSD 3.5 for drums and Trillian for bass.

Tuning: Drop D tuning

Tempo: 110 BPM