Somewhere in the Middle Ages, a handful of monks heard the tritone, clutched their robes, and allegedly branded it diabolus in musica — the Devil in music. Six semitones of pure, unresolved dread. And here I am, roughly 900 years later, cheerfully building an entire lick out of the one interval the Church tried to have cancelled.
This is Lick #21: a compact little lead phrase that leans on the tritone — that famously tense, wonderfully unstable augmented fourth (or diminished fifth, depending on which way it's glaring at you) — to smear some drama over an otherwise polite line. Twenty-four seconds, one devilish interval, and zero exorcisms required.
How the tritone lick works
A tritone is exactly three whole tones — six frets — sitting dead centre between the root and the octave. That symmetry is the whole trick: it belongs to no comfy major or minor home, so your ear hears it as a question with no polite answer. Drop it into a phrase and every note around it suddenly sounds like it's about to confess something. The useful takeaway: don't just land on the tritone and sit there looking pleased. Approach it by step, hit that flat-five tension, then resolve a half-step into a chord tone — the release is where the magic actually lives. It's the same push-and-pull that powers every sneaky tritone hiding in a pop tune and every ominous prog-rock intro riff you've ever air-guitared.
Play it clean and it's jazzy and unsettled; crank the gain and it's basically metal's favourite spice. Either way, you're weaponising the one interval medieval monks lost sleep over — and honestly, if that isn't worth a couple of minutes of practice, I don't know what is. Want the tab and the Guitar Pro file so you can annoy your own local clergy? It's over on my Patreon.