Welcome to Writing Progressive Rock Riffs with Rabea Massaad! In this introductory video, Rabea gives you a breakdown of what to expect from this course, how he is going to approach the material and what you’ll need to know to get the most out of it.

As a primer to this course and to give some background on Rabea as a guitarist, we start by deconstructing his sound and style and exploring how this has developed over his career so far. Discover key milestones in developing his sound, his favourite scales and intervals when writing new music, the influence of movie scores on his playing, how learning drums before guitar gave him a different insight into rhythm playing and some ways he tries to make his songwriting feel unique.

In this lesson, Rabea explores some of the broad concepts he will cover in this course. You will look at finding emotive chord progressions, tuning your guitar down to access new sonic landscapes, using the chord-scale system to write riffs that flow harmonically, and how thinking of riffs in 16th notes helps you to break free of traditional rhythms.

A staple sound within Progressive Rock is to connect chord progressions with riffs. This can be a real challenge, but Rabea breaks down how he writes interesting parts to fill out the space between chords.

Rabea is an avid fan of using effects pedals to create huge tones and inspire his songwriting. If you're looking for inspiration and guidance on how to incorporate effects into your riffs, this lesson is for you. You'll look at reverb, delay, fuzz, and octave pedals to dial in the perfect tone and create a sound that is truly unique to you.

Writing Progressive Rock riffs is all about thinking outside of the box, and experimenting with alternate tunings is a great way to do this. Rabea walks you through his favourite alternate tunings, how they change his approach to writing riffs, and some pitfalls to watch out for.

What are the techniques that Rabea considers essential for expressing yourself creatively in your riffs? You'll look at tapped and pinch harmonics, hammer-ons and pull-offs, bends, slides, and more, to widen your palette of available sounds.

Rabea's background as a drummer before learning guitar allowed him to develop an advanced sense of rhythm and timing, which helps massively when writing tight, articulate Progressive Rock riffs. In this lesson, he distils that knowledge into a simple 16th note framework which will help you to write and dissect riffs with more confidence and accuracy.

Following on from the 16th note framework that Rabea taught you in the last lesson, he shows you how to use it to write more interesting phrases that sound like they are written in an odd time signature, but are actually still in 4/4. This is a great tool for creating unique and interesting riffs without throwing the listener off too much and will open up a whole new approach to writing and understanding complex riffs.

Odd time signatures are almost a prerequisite to writing Progressive Rock! In this lesson you will start to explore other time signatures outside of 4/4, starting with the compound time signature 6/8. Rabea teaches you some different ways you can feel this time signature and shows you a cool trick for playing ‘across’ it to change 6/8 from having a 'ballad' vibe to sounding more 'hard rock'.

We are now entering the realms of more advanced time signatures! Rabea loves writing in 5/8 because it instantly gives him access to a whole new feel for the listener and makes him think outside of the conventional comfort zone of 4/4. Don't worry; he shows you an effortless way of counting in 5/8 and making it feel just as natural as 4/4 (with a bit of practice!)

Continuing to explore odd time signatures, let's look at 7/8. Just like Rabea showed you in the previous lesson, there are ways to normalise this odd time signature so that you can feel natural playing it and allow yourself to explore 7/8 creatively when writing Progressive Rock riffs.

This short video introduces the next few lessons, where Rabea will be exploring some of his favourite themes and inspirations when it comes to writing songs and riffs within this genre. This section of the course focuses more on creativity, songwriting and mindset, which will give you a great chance to apply the knowledge you've built up so far.

Great songwriting is about contrast, so being able to go from crushing heavy riffs to an emotive ambient section is a great skill to have in your songwriting toolbox. Rabea explores how he creates ambient riffs by utilising space, effective chord and scale choice, effects pedals and dynamics.

Sometimes Rabea wants to take a song into a sinister, dark vibe. Having the right tools and approach to do this is a great skill to have when writing Progressive Rock. In this lesson, he explores his approaches, intervallic choices and influences when writing sinister-sounding riffs.

To elevate a song into a chaotic, frantic section, Rabea needs to draw on the right approach dynamically and harmonically to make this work seamlessly. Follow along with this lesson to find out how he achieves this sound and try it out for yourself!

No Progressive Rock song would be complete with an epic reprise to release some of the tension that a more technical, chaotic section might have built up. Writing epic riffs requires a completely different approach to writing frantic riffs, and in this lesson, Rabea breaks down how he creates these huge, awe-inspiring sections.

What makes a riff sound heavy? It's a subject often debated amongst Progressive Rock fans, but, for Rabea, a heavy riff has some fairly universal characteristics. Join him in this lesson to find out what those are and how you can take your riffs to a whole new level of crushing heaviness.

It's time to take all of this knowledge and apply it to a song. 'Hotel Cal-Fortin' is an original track by Rabea and in this dense lesson he breaks it down for you to follow along. Make sure to check out the notation and tab associated with this lesson, as well as the backing track version Rabea has created exclusively for Musicisum students to play along with!

You've made it to the end of the course! In this final lesson, Rabea shares some parting words of wisdom and encouragement to help you apply this knowledge to your playing and to keep pushing your boundaries in this truly limitless genre.