Learn to play Killing in The Name by Rage Against The Machine on guitar.
We have put together the very best free lessons available online (Over 2.6 million people have watched these video lessons on their quest to play Killing in The Name.) and we are adding new lessons as they become available.
You can listen to the song here on Spotify while you play along!
Our Top Choice
Marty Music
This lesson has been viewed over 900,000 times!
Other Great Choices
Justin Guitar
This lesson has been viewed over 800,000 times!
In this lesson, we’ll learn how to play Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine on the guitar. It’s a mega cool tune, one of my favorites – powerful song, message, band. Tom Morello is awesome!
Another Great Choice
GuitarLessons365Song
This lesson has been viewed over 800,000 times.
In this Killing in the Name guitar lesson video, I will show you how to play all of the guitar riffs in this massive hard rock hit by Rage Against the Machine.
“Killing in the Name” has become Rage Against the Machine’s signature track due in most part to it’s infectious guitar riffs. These riffs are played in Dropped “D” tuning, so be sure to tune your guitar starting the from the 6th string (DADGBE).
There are many cool riffs in the this one and I will take you through them all in the same order that they appear in the song. The only section I will skip (for now) is the guitar solo.
As I am sure you already know, Tom Morello’s guitar solo uses a whammy pedal the entire time. The pedal is being used to change the pitch of the lead guitar lines by either an octave and 2 octaves. Since I don’t have a whammy pedal available at the moment, it would be impossible to make the solo sound like the record. The solo itself is really fun to play so I would be willing to teach a non-whammy version of it (basically everything he is actually playing on the guitar as heard without the pedal effect) if enough of you guys want to learn it.
The riffs have a very cool and in your face funky quality, with liberal use of fret-hand muting, octaves, bends, tremolo picking and hammer-ons. A couple of them can be a little bit tricky so simply isolated those riffs and practice them by repeating them over and over again in rhythm.
Don’t worry about playing the entire song until you can confident play each riff on it’s own. Then it will simply be a process of putting it all together into one cohesive unit. Enjoy!