Heart-Shaped Box

Heart-Shaped Box is one of those riffs that are instantly recognisable, and if like me you’re into slow heavy riffs, this song is extremely fun to play!

The tuning

To play Heart-Shaped Box, we have to tune our guitar to a Drop C# tuning, which means that all of the strings are down a semitone, but the E string is in C#.

So the tuning of the individual strings would be C#, Ab, Db, Gb, Bb, Eb.

I know tuning your guitar differently is something that can push learners to skip learning a song because it’s a bit overwhelming, but I really invite you to try to tune your guitar and carry on! You won’t regret it.

The Main Riff

To play the main riff, we’re going to need three chords, Ab5, E5 and Db5. The chord shapes are actually pretty easy to play thanks to the drop tuning we’re using.

To play the main riff, the idea is to pluck the strings one by one, starting from the root note of the chord. On Ab5 and E5, we follow the same “movement” where we go up three strings and back to the previous one that we finish on. On Db5, the pattern changes a bit as we’ll play the three lower strings one by one, before playing the Ab string, the Db string, and the Ab string again.

We’re playing Ab5 for two beats, E5 for two beats as well, while Db5 (with the open strings) is played for a whole bar.

At the end of the main riff, we’ve got a very cool melody where we play the open C# string that we’re going to let ring. We then slide to fret 4 of the Db string that we play twice, before playing the open Ab string. After that, we go back to playing fret 4 on the Db string once, before playing the third fret on the Ab string and fret 4 on the Db string together. We finish that melody by playing both the Db and Gb strings open, and together!

Right before the first chorus arrives, the melody simplifies a little bit. We’re still playing the same notes, but this time, we just slide to fret 4 on the Db string that we play four times. After that, we play fret 3 on the Ab string twice, and we finish on the open Db string!

The Chorus

The chorus of Heart-Shaped Box uses the same chord shapes as the main riff we’ve just seen. We’re following the same structure as the riff, and we still have Ab5, E5 and Db5. But this time, we’re going to add a very cool bend on fret 4 on the Gb string on beats 2 and 4.

On Db5 (the last chord), we’re going to play the same melody we’ve seen in the very last part of the verse, except this time, we’ll finish with a bend on fret 4 on the Gb string instead of the open string.

The outro of the chorus varies a bit, with E5 played for four beats (a whole bar). We then move on to Db5 for four beats as well, but we’re going to add our bend on fret 4 on the Gb string again on the “and” of beat 2, and beat number 4.We end that outro by playing the same melody we’ve seen at the very end of the verse!

The Solo

This solo has quite a unique “horizontal” form, with a few tricky bends. And just so you know, we’re playing over the Ab natural minor scale:

We repeat the same melody twice, and end on a huge Ab5, played with the same chord shape we’ve seen before!

In conclusion

This is such an iconic song to play, and with chord shapes that are actually not that hard to play thanks to the Drop C# tuning we’re using, I really invite you to have fun with it and to try and play along with the original track as soon as you can!