Writing an intro riff for your own band is a special flavour of self-sabotage: you get to be both the guy who has to nail it live and the guy who wrote it too hard in the first place. Welcome to "Nightfall", where past-me was clearly holding a grudge against present-me.
This little clip isolates the opening guitar figure of Atomic Symphony's "Nightfall" — 49 seconds of pure intro, stripped of the rest of the band so you can actually hear the phrasing, steal the mood, and learn the piece from the ground up.
How this intro riff sets the mood
An intro riff has one job before the drums even show up: establish the tonal centre and the atmosphere. That's less about how many notes you cram in and more about phrasing — which notes you let ring, where you breathe, and how you lean on the minor tonality to make the whole thing sound like dusk quietly falling. The trick here isn't speed, it's restraint. Play it to a metronome to lock the pulse, then deliberately let the final note hang a beat longer than feels comfortable. That sustain is the "mood" everyone keeps talking about.
Concrete takeaway: loop the figure slowly and record yourself. If it sounds busy, you're rushing the phrasing; if it sounds like something is about to happen, you nailed it. Once it's under your fingers, the same intro opens the door to the hybrid-picking riff and the two-finger tapping lick from later in the song.
And yes, I wrote this to sound menacing and then had to practise it alone in my living room at 2am like an absolute goblin. Want the PDF and Guitar Pro file so you can skip that part? They live over on my Patreon.