He's one of the most technically proficient of all prog rock guitarists, and his guitar parts would take several lifetimes to fully comprehend. Dare you enter the court of the Crimson King, Robert Fripp?
We delve into the mad, brilliant lead phrasing and fearsome alternate picking of one of guitar's true masters
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Robert Fripp was born in Dorset, England in 1946. His 50-plus years of work with King Crimson is full of mind-bending and finger-twisting guitar parts that would take several lifetimes to fully comprehend.
So we will focus on the ’80s era which featured Fripp alongside Adrian Belew on guitar and vocals. Tracks like Frame By Frame, Discipline, and Three Of A Perfect Pair feature a unique guitar style focused on odd, poly-metric riffs, melodies and motifs played with relentless alternate picking.
In 2024 it was announced that a new band named BEAT would feature Adrian Belew and Steve Vai, who was hand picked by Robert Fripp to perform his guitar parts, which Steve himself admits is a challenge of the tallest order.
Each of our examples is played with strict alternate picking in order to give the music rock solid timing and perfect execution. It will challenge your picking accuracy, especially when skipping from string to string without speeding up or slowing down. Take some time to study your picking hand, either by using a mirror, or videoing yourself to look for any excessive motions.
The concept is simple, in that your pick should travel from note to note and string to string in the most relaxed and economical way as possible. Use your wrist to move your hand in a loose, but controlled fashion, using as little of the tip of the pick as you can to produce a clear attack, but avoid digging in too much as this slows down string changes.
Playing these examples confidently and in time with the backing tracks is a numbers game. King Crimson music often layers two or more different time signatures on top of each other.
This concept was inspired by Indonesian gamelan music and applied to the guitar parts by Fripp and Belew. Each part is usually panned left and right and each is each relatively simple once you know the numerical code. But the two parts combined create an illusion of incredible complexity.
In our examples we’ve kept to 3/4 and 4/4 time. Within that, a bar of 16th notes can be divided into any even, or odd note groupings you wish, in order to compose repeating melodic motifs within it.
We have described the numerical codes for unlocking each riff in the tab captions, so be sure to count through each example and be confident you can do it in a way that makes sense to you.
Practising with a metronome is highly recommended, the idea being to focus on keeping the 16th-note phrasing even. The next challenge is to play along with the backing tracks on which we’ve included some Adrian Belew style counter melodies which are often similar to the Fripp-style part, but slightly different, or even displaced through the bar differently.
This is vastly different to playing to a simple metronome click as the sound of the other rhythms will inevitably affect your coordination and sense of where the downbeat is, adding an extra challenge to expanding your discipline. But as they say, ‘no pain, no gain’!
Play each example slowly, focusing on your accuracy, counting, timing and economy of motion before gradually increasing the tempo until you can comfortably play each section up to speed with the backing tracks. Good luck!
Robert uses Gibson Les Paul and Fernandes guitars with a Roland JC-120 for his classic clean chorus sound. You can use any clean guitar amp with a chorus pedal and set both the effect rate and depth high.
Use a medium guitar pick to soften the attack on the strings for a more even tone and add a compressor pedal before the amp to further control the overall picking consistency.
Example 1
This riff is based around four repeats of a 10-note pattern that’s played across the bar lines. This not particularly easy pattern can be broken down into smaller groups of 4, 3 & 3. After the four repeats, finish off the bar with two more four-note groups.
Example 2
Here we have an extreme string skipping riff played in a repeating six-note pattern from major in the first bar to minor in the second bar. Use strict alternate picking while moving your hand from the wrist and aim to keep the tip of your pick as close to the strings as possible, without accidentally hitting them until you pick.
Example 3
This riff is based in F# minor pentatonic (F#-A-B-C#-E) and descends using 3rd and 4th intervals played with a series of two string barres played as finger rolls to keep the notes separated. Think of the pattern as four groups of seven 16th notes with the final note being extended to a quarter-note to complete the bar.
Example 4
This riff is based in the A Aeolian mode (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) played with the first finger at 7th fret and fourth finger at the 10th fret. Use all four fingers with one finger per fret to play the notes and keep your pick moving strictly down and up throughout.
Example 5
This is a long riff played in 16th notes across three bars in G whole-tone scale (G-A-B-C#-D#-F). Learn each bar in isolation first before joining them together.
The phrasing of the first bar is mainly based in groups of five notes, bar two is comprised of threes and fours, and the final bar goes back to a five-note pattern.
Charlie Griffiths plays guitar in acclaimed prog-metal outfit Haken, and has a wealth of experience handling corporate and session gigs for genres as diverse as rock, heavy metal and pop. He has been a regular contributor to Total Guitar, Guitar Techniques, and Guitar World for over a decade, and released his debut solo album Tiktaalika in 2022.
