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All Right Now - Free

Learn How To Play 'All Right Now' by Free on the Guitar!

In this guitar lesson, we are going to learn the intro riff to the song, "All Right Now" by the band Free. This is a great classic rock riff, so put a fair amount of overdrive on your amp and use your bridge pickup to get a nice crunchy tone. There are really only three shapes to this riff, so you should be able to jump right in and play it fairly quickly. A couple of things that you will want to be aware of are the muting of the strings and the constant partial bar chord that you have to hold down with your index finger. We have provided the guitar tab for you so you can see exactly what is going on.

Let's start off by getting our constant partial bar chord in place. We are really just playing a standard A chord. Instead of using our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd finger to fret the D, G, and B strings on the 2nd fret, we will just lay our 1st finger across all three of those strings on the 2nd fret. This will create our partial bar chord that we need. Our 1st finger will remain there throughout the entire riff. This may seem a bit difficult at first, but it is a good exercise for more difficult bar chord shapes. Now, lets add our 4th finger to complete the first shape of the riff. Use your 4th finger to create another partial bar by laying it across the B and E strings on the 5th fret. That's the entire first shape. Strum all of the strings except the low E string. Now mute all of the strings with your right hand right after you strum them. Now strum this shape one more time. Learn some basic strumming patterns here!

At this point, we need to switch to the second shape of the riff. Keep your partial A bar chord in place and take your 4th finger off the strings. Put your 3rd finger on the 4th fret of the D string and your 2nd finger on the 3rd fret of the B string. That is your second shape. Give all of the strings, except for the high and low E strings, one strum. Switch back to your first shape and strum that shape once and mute it again.

The second phrase of the riff starts out with the same shape with which we started. Strum this shape once. For our next shape, leave your partial A bar chord in place. Move your 4th finger to the 5th fret of your D string and your 2nd finger to the 3rd fret of your B string. Now strum all of the strings once. Make sure to leave out the high and low E strings. Switch to the second shape that we learned and strum all of the strings except the high and low E strings once.

Thats the whole riff. The only variation is on the rhythm of the second phrase when you play it through for the second time. Instead of just strumming each chord once, the strumming pattern for these last two shapes will be "down up mute down up down." Be sure to mute the strings a bit in between the first up and second down strokes.

Learning this riff will help you get a good feel for classic rock and it's a lot of fun too. You can take these shapes and try to use them in your everyday playing as well.

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