There are songs that ask you to grow as a musician, that demand years of scales and heartbreak and finger calluses. And then there is "Down With The Sickness", which asks you to hit one low string very hard and make the "ooh-wah-ah-ah-ah" face while you do it. Guess which one is more fun on a Tuesday night.
This little clip runs through the riffs from Disturbed's nu-metal cornerstone, and here's the reassuring part: it sounds like a monster truck reversing over a drum kit, but it's built from about three ideas total. Detune, chug, repeat, terrify. If you've ever wanted to sound genuinely menacing while doing almost nothing, this is your riff.
How the Down With The Sickness riff works
The secret is the tuning. Disturbed drop the low string down to a droning drop-D shape (and tune the whole guitar down a bit for extra sludge), which collapses a power chord into a single finger laid flat across the bottom three strings. That's the cheat code of nu-metal: you're not fretting complicated chords, you're barring one finger and letting gravity do the rest. Now bring in the picking hand. Rest the heel of your palm lightly on the strings by the bridge — that's your palm mute — and chug. The magic isn't the notes, it's the rhythm: short, syncopated bursts that lock onto the kick drum so tightly that guitar and drums sound like one furious instrument.
Concrete takeaway: practice the chug with a metronome before you add any pitches. Mute the strings completely with your fretting hand and just play the rhythm as percussion, locking every chug to the click. Once the groove is solid, the actual notes take about ten minutes to learn — the same trick that powers Korn's "Here To Stay" and half the nu-metal canon.
Fair warning: once you can chug convincingly, you will do it constantly, at every guitar in every shop, until you are politely asked to leave. If you'd like the PDF and Guitar Pro file so you can annoy people with correct rhythms, they're waiting on my Patreon.