There's a special kind of Paul Gilbert riff that sounds like a lovely little melody you could hum in the shower, right up until you pick up a guitar and realise your two hands were not consulted during the writing process. "Silence Followed By A Deafening Roar" is exactly that: the intro is so singable it feels like a gift, and then it asks your picking hand to leapfrog over a string like it's nothing.
This clip is the intro riff to Gilbert's 2008 title track, laid out slowly enough that you can actually see where the strings get skipped. It's melodic, it's technical, and it comes with tab and a Guitar Pro file so you can study the thing at 0.5x speed like the responsible adult you pretend to be.
How this string-skipping intro actually works
The trick to Gilbert's intro isn't blistering speed — it's the string skipping. Instead of running the melody up neighbouring strings, the line jumps over a string to grab a note, which gives it that wide, vocal, almost horn-like leap. The problem is that skipped string sits right there in the middle, quietly begging to ring out and ruin your take. Your job is to mute it: let your picking-hand palm rest lightly across the strings you're not playing, and keep your fretting-hand fingers gently touching the neighbours. The notes should sound deliberate and clean, with silence where the roar hasn't arrived yet.
Practically: play it with strict alternate picking, and aim your pick at the target string in one motion rather than "hopping" over the gap in two nervous little jerks. Set a metronome painfully slow, watch that the skipped string stays dead silent, and only then nudge the tempo. Ten clean reps beat a hundred sloppy fast ones — this is Gilbert's whole philosophy in one riff: melody first, fireworks second.
And if it still sounds like a cat falling down a staircase after a week, don't worry, so did mine — that's what the slow-motion video and the tab are for. Grab the Guitar Pro file and the rest of my riff library over on Patreon.