How Dave Grohl uses his drumming knowledge to create guitar riffs
Like most of the prominent music icons of the latter 20th century, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl isn’t a classically trained musician. Beginning his musical odyssey as a drummer, he learned through imitation.
Grohl once explained that he would spend hours on end “in my bedroom practising alone to Beatles records (…) battering my drums until my hands literally bled,” as he remembered in his 2020 bestselling autobiography, Dave’s True Stories.
Following the death of his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain in 1994, Grohl decided to turn a leaf to a new chapter apart from his surviving Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic. This new chapter would tell the story of Foo Fighters, but it would take some work to get off the ground.
Up until 1994, Gohl was predominantly a drummer, but as the leader of the Foo Fighters project, he began to try his hand with guitar, vocals and any other instrument he might require in the studio.
Through the mid-1990s, Grohl took up the guitar as a means of songwriting. With a few simple chord patterns, he could lay his poetry down to a rhythm and develop his songs.
During his 2020 appearance at Oates Song Fest, Grohl told the story of Foo Fighters’ classic 1997 hit ‘Everlong’ and how it simply came to him in the studio one day, guitar in hand, while working on the band’s second album, The Colour and the Shape.
He explained that it began with a modified chord. “I’m not a trained musician, so I don’t know what that chord is,” he says. At first, he thought it was a chord from the 1987 Sonic Youth hit ‘Schizophrenia’ since they were one of his favourite bands, and he listened to their music profusely. Grohl said one intriguing chord led to another, and soon he had a rough sketch of the song to run with.
Grohl soon had a rough demo of the song in which he impressively played all of the instruments. For the final studio polished version of the track, his girlfriend, Louise Post, provided vocals recorded via the telephone line, as she was on a trip to Chicago at the time.
A year after the highly successful release of The Colour and the Shape, Grohl found himself performing ‘Everlong’ live on Howard Stern. This time, he showed off his intricate acoustic fingerstyle version. “I never considered doing this acoustically; I thought it was a rock song,” Grohl later told Kerrang. “It gave the song a new life. It makes the song feel the way I always wish it would.”
Over the past three decades, Grohl has developed his guitar skills to become one of the finest modern frontmen as well as one of the greatest drummers in rock history. In a 2010 conversation with Guitarist, Grohl explained how his earlier drumming knowledge informed his guitar style while he showed himself the ropes.
“I like to play guitar like a drummer,” he said, demonstrating with a guitar on his lap. “When I look at a guitar, I almost look at it like a drum set where your low E string is the kick drum, your A and D are the snares, and so when you’re writing riffs, I use the lower notes as kick and snare and the higher notes as cymbals.”
Watch the full interview video below.
