Scott Travis kicks the doors in with that double-bass drum intro, and for one glorious second you think, "I've got this." Then the guitars arrive, and the Painkiller riff proceeds to sprint uphill in E minor while your picking hand jogs behind it, wheezing and waving a little white flag.
This fourteen-second clip breaks down the intro riff to Judas Priest's "Painkiller" — one of the most ferocious openings in all of metal — arranged for guitar. It's short, it's mean, and it is an extremely satisfying target if you love fast, aggressive riffing. Tabs and a Guitar Pro file are included, so you don't have to reverse-engineer the whole thing by ear at 200 bpm.
How the Painkiller riff actually works
Strip away the fury and the riff is really a relentless engine of strict alternate picking — down, up, down, up, no cheating — chewing through chromatic notes that climb and coil around the root in E minor. That chromaticism is the trick: it's the "wrong" notes bolted onto a minor tonality that give Painkiller its evil, sharpened-blade sound, rather than a clean scale run. The single most useful thing you can do is set a metronome absurdly slow, lock your picking to a strict down-up, and only raise the tempo once every note is even and clean. Speed is a by-product of accuracy, not the goal.
Keep your picking-hand wrist loose and let it float — a death-grip on the pick is what turns this from a riff into a forearm injury. If you like this kind of Priest, the far friendlier Breaking the Law riff is a good place to build the same wrist before you come back and pick a fight with this one.
Fair warning: I have played this riff a great many times and my metronome and I are no longer on speaking terms. Want the tab and Guitar Pro file so your wrist can suffer in properly notated comfort? Grab everything on my Patreon.