As a founding member of the bands Clutch and The Bakerton Group, Tim Sult has been making righteous noise for rock-minded listeners since 1991. His riffs are catchy, potent, and they resonate with a certain pragmatic personality that is both approachable and immediately identifiable. Over the last 25 years, Sult has refined and honed his style from the more raw aesthetic of the early days, but certain elements have remained constant.

Playing like Tim Sult is easy.

Most of the riffs Tim Sult has played in Clutch songs are simple pentatonic affairs that don’t involve a lot of acrobatics. If you want to play like him, take that riff you’re working on, stop trying to impress your dumb friends with twiddly bits and extra palm mutes and your nervous little vibrato, and just let the riff stand on its own.

The riff is what’s important – not how you got it out of your guitar. Nobody cares how you did it. Or if it was difficult. Or complicated. Just get out of its way and let the riff do the work – that’s what it’s for.

Playing like Tim Sult is hard.

You’ve gotta play your guitar like you’re doing a job. A job you can’t screw up or you’ll get fired, and hell, people might die.

Play that riff like you’re building a bridge – not some fancy, artsy, bullshit bridge that amateur photographers post filtered photos of on Instagram – but the kind of slab concrete unbreakable bridge that your family will be driving across every day. Because it’s got to work. And stay up. And do that every single day without fail, regardless of weather or traffic or whatever the hell else.

That bridge, your riff, needs to stand the test of time. Keep it simple and direct. That is how you play like Tim Sult.

What? You want details?

You see, the real genius of Sult’s playing is in his economy. I’m not talking about picking economy or technique – I’m talking about his artistic voice. I’ve been listening to Clutch since the mid-’90s, and to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the man play an unnecessary note. If it needs to be there, it’s there, and if it doesn’t, it isn’t. Tim Sult takes a blues pentatonic riff that another guitarist might write, and then strips out every little extraneous bit until the only things remaining are the barest bones necessary to get the point across. And that is far harder to do than it sounds – at least for me.
As a player, I tend to stray into the busier side of things. It’s not uncommon to catch myself starting with a riff or phrase that I like, and then spending way too much time coming up with little embellishments to add to it that usually A.) interest only me, and B.) don’t do anything to serve the greater whole of the riff or the song. To someone like myself, listening to a Clutch record is both incredibly refreshing and inspiring in its directness, because Tim Sult can absolutely slay with 2 chords and a backbeat what I would try to do with 12 notes and a pinch harmonic.

Sult plays like a machine – his parts may often be unadorned, but they are technically perfect. Each note rings true, each chord hits with its full power, and his timing is ever in the pocket and flawless. That’s not to imply he plays without emotion – when he deigns to employ vibrato, the Earth trembles with it. It’s just that the man understands restraint.

What that kind of restraint does for his playing – and for ours, if we have the guts to put in the work – is make every single bit of it sound important. When done with skill and taste, a simple part is never boring, and it’s usually only when you sit down and try to learn how to play it yourself that you realize how simple it really is.

A Lot with a Little

A fantastic example of Sult’s brilliant economy is in the song “Book, Saddle, and Go” from Clutch’s 2013 album Earth Rocker.

Don’t be a puss – listen to the whole damn song, but pay special attention to the riff in the verses (first example at 0:29).

That is a one-note riff. Oh sure, it’s 3 octaves, and one of them is a 2-note chord, and one is being bent up a step or two, but it’s one note. It’s just D. And it is awesome.

But how? How does a one-note riff sound that cool? In this case, I can think of several reasons…

First of all, he’s letting drummer Jean-Paul Gaster do a lot of the work. Gaster is laying down a steady 1-2 shuffle that propels everything forward, and Sult is dropping that earworm of a riff right on top, leaving a lot of breathing room between phrases, and starting each phrase on the “and” before the “1,” keeping up with the shuffling feel and accenting the real meat of the groove. It’s so perfect that Neil Fallon can basically just holler at you over it and it sounds great.

Technique aside, it’s still pretty difficult to not sound awesome with a guitar like this.

Secondly, it’s his tone. What you’re hearing is a P-90-equipped Les Paul Special or Junior through a very hot British tube amp, but more importantly, you’re hearing the sound of open strings, which lends an almost extra-electric quality to the sound of the notes. In particular, the higher D (one octave up from the open, dropped-D 6th string) that follows the 1st-and-2nd-string D power chord in the 2nd phrase. That is just an open 4th string, hit once, and it’s the electrifying, emotional center of the entire riff. Many players would be tempted to hit that note from the 12th fret of the 6th string – it’s right there, after all, after the 10th-fret chord – within easy reach. And it’s the same note, right? So it should sound the same.

Wrong.

A note played at the 12th fret does not sound anything like the same note from an open string. And that’s why Tim Sult decides to skip a string and hit the open note. It sounds better. It fits the riff more. But it is more difficult, even if it’s technically simpler. First of all, you still have to mute that high D chord that precedes it, and you’ve got to go from picking that chord to hitting the D string perfectly in time, without accidentally bonking any of the others on your way in there. It would be easier to play it cleanly if you played it on the lowest string, but the riff would lose something. In the incredible economy of that riff, the specific timbre of that one note is super important. Sult knows that, and you should too, because that is the kind of attention to detail
it takes if you want to write such a simple riff and stick the landing that hard.

Picking Your Moments

None of this is to say that everything Sult plays is brain-dead-simple. He can throw down when it’s called for, he just picks his moments well. Like many great players, some of his simple-sounding material is deceptively tricky to play correctly.

Another great example is the song “Minotaur” – the track containing the title lyric from 2009’s Strange Cousins from the West.

Sult’s playing is considerably busier in this song compared to the first example, but you’ll notice that almost none of it happens while Neil Fallon is singing. Sult uses the pace and phrasing of his lines to complete each melody started by the vocalist, leaving tons of space in between for the vocals. He does little things here and there, like dropping out completely instead of leaving a ringing chord, and he plays the 2nd verse riff an octave lower than the first, matching the bassline more closely. He allows the song to pick up energy as it goes by refraining from resolving every melody, holding back on using vibrato until enough tension has been built. It’s very effective way for the use of less to accomplish more, even in a song where the rhythm playing moves around a lot more.

These men are professionals. Let them do their jobs.

Perhaps most key is the way he uses his guitar to fill in only where it’s needed. Tim Sult’s playing in this song is providing exactly what the other instruments cannot, and only that. If an accent is sufficiently hit by the bass, or if a groove is laid well enough by the drums, Sult feels no need to jump in and muddy the water. He waits until it’s time to do what only he can do, and his contribution is made all the more significant by his restraint.

The lessons we can learn from listening to a player like Sult is something that can be applied regardless of style, skill, genre, or attitude. If you’re a busy player (like I tend to be), take some time to think about how you can make your playing more effective and hit the listener harder by being concise with your ideas. By recognizing that a simple riff played just right trumps a complicated riff played almost perfectly, we mature as songwriters and guitar players, and sound more seasoned and professional as a result.