"La Sitiera" Intro Riff, Explained

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It includes all of my notes for this lesson, allowing you to follow along at your own pace. You're free to download, print, and share the PDF across your devices.

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About This Lesson

I’ve been working on The Mavericks’ amazing intro riff to La Sitiera, and want to share some insights I learned along the way! Specifically I’ll be talking about lead guitar and finger placement. How do we know which fingers to use on which notes, when learning a tricky riff? It’s often unclear and always slightly different – but there are some general guidelines I’ll explain here to help you out.

  • 0:00 Overview
  • 4:32 Riff Breakdown
  • 15:59 Playthrough
  • 17:15 Farewell & SM-57

Zoomed Playthrough with Tabs

Here’s me playing through this main riff twice, with tabs on screen. Finger placement notes included!

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Listen to the Mavericks Play It

Album version (opening track from En Español). Note, at the end of the 6th measure, he’s playing an F note (1st fret, low E string) just before the F# bass note is played. In my tab, I show this as the open low E string. It’s not a huge difference, but his approach adds a nice bit of flavor to things.

Live version:

Another live version:


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