Dokken - Breaking the Chains - Guitar Lesson

Breaking the Chains

1983 3:52

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About Breaking the Chains

George Lynch's guitar work is front and center on "Breaking the Chains," and the song rewards the effort you put into its rhythmic riffing. The main riff sits in E minor and leans heavily on palm-muted power chords with a punchy, locked-in groove at 120 BPM, so your picking hand consistency matters as much as your fretting hand. Lynch layers rhythm playing with melodic lead fills throughout, meaning you need to switch gears cleanly rather than staying in one mode the whole time. The solo is where things get genuinely demanding: Lynch combines legato runs with aggressive picking bursts, and the phrasing can feel slippery until you have really internalized it. Use the Practice Toolbar to loop the solo slowed down, isolating the transitions between the smoother legato stretches and the picked flurries. Dokken made this the title track of their debut, and it remains one of the cleaner entry points into Lynch's style within Hard Rock.

• The main riff is built on palm-muted E minor power chords in standard tuning, making right-hand muting precision the first thing to nail.
• George Lynch's solo blends legato hammer-on phrases with picked runs, requiring you to shift technique mid-phrase without losing momentum.
• At 120 BPM the song sits at a moderate tempo, which actually makes the rhythmic tightness of the riff harder to fake than a faster tempo would.