You play it wrong. I played it wrong for years, and so does nearly everyone who grabs a guitar off a shop wall. Ritchie Blackmore has been saying it for decades, usually with a perfectly straight face: no pick.
I learned it the way everyone learns it. Index finger flat across two strings, plectrum digging in, downstrokes like chopping wood. It sounded fine. It sounded like the campfire version, because that’s what it was.
Put on Machine Head and listen to what actually happens from the first second. Blackmore plays two-note stacks on the middle strings. Parallel fourths, a four-note blues line in G minor (G, Bb, C, Db) with the same shape mirrored a fourth below. And he doesn’t strum them. He plucks both strings at once with his fingers, so the notes snap instead of smear. “It’s third position, and plucked. Never with a pick,” he told Guitar Player in 2016. A picked power chord fills the room like a wall. A plucked fourth rings hollow and old, almost medieval, no accident from a man who loves medieval music enough to have built a second career on it.
My own transcription, first two bars of the main motif
(studio version, Machine Head, 1972, the riff opens the track at 0:00):
G|--0--3--5----0--3--6--5--|
D|--0--3--5----0--3--6--5--|Same frets on both strings, plucked together, fingers only. When Blackmore says third position, this is what he means: the fretting hand parks with the index finger over the third fret and the pinky reaching the sixth, never shifting, while the open pairs ring open. Let each pair ring into the next. That’s the whole secret, and it’s why the shop version never sounds right.
The song itself is reportage. On 4 December 1971 the Montreux Casino burned down during a Frank Zappa and The Mothers concert, after someone fired a flare gun into the ceiling, and the smoke drifted out over Lake Geneva. Deep Purple, in town to record there, ended up cutting Machine Head that December in the corridors of the near-empty Grand Hotel with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio parked outside. The riff came out of those sessions, and Roger Glover woke up days later with the title already in his head. By the summer of 1973 the single was a top five hit in the US. Guitar shop staff have been wincing ever since. The riff sits on the forbidden riff list for a reason: too famous, too easy to attempt, too hard to get right.
Then there’s the Beethoven story. Blackmore has called the riff “an interpretation of inversion” of the Fifth Symphony’s opening motif, adding: “I owe him a lot of money.” Lovely quote. Treat it with the scepticism it has earned. Turn Beethoven’s da-da-da-dum upside down and you do not land on this riff. And when Blackmore went on CNN in 2007 to demonstrate the right and the wrong way of playing it, the lesson was about technique, not Beethoven. My reading: he means the spirit, not the notes. Four notes, maximum menace, nothing wasted.
The official animated video below retells the whole Montreux story. The remix is by Dweezil Zappa, son of the man whose gig burned the casino down. Somebody in that camp has a sense of humour.
Dig out Machine Head and play along the right way for once. Put the pick down. Pluck. And once this one rings right, there are easier metal riffs for beginners waiting to be butchered too.
