Plug In Baby Guitar Tab

Learning Muse's Plug In Baby

The main riff is a simple three-chord turnaround that goes E5, A5, B5, then back down to A5. It loops fast. Around 170 BPM, which means the rhythm guitar is basically just chugging through those shapes with tight palm muting. I remember trying to learn this back when tabs were still mostly text-based on websites that loaded painfully slow. A lot of early tabs for this song were wrong about the timing. They'd show the right notes but get the string crossings wrong. The actual riff spends a lot of time on the D and G strings, not just the bottom two strings like most beginner tabs suggest.

Plug In Baby Guitar Tab Breakdown

Here is the main riff, written out properly: E string (high E): 7 - 9 - 12 - 11 - 7 - 9
A string: 7 - 9
D string: 7 - 9 - 12 That's the core idea. Play it as eighth notes with palm muting and it sounds exactly like the recording. The trick is getting the fret hand to move cleanly between the D string and high E string positions, especially when you're at speed. Your fingers need to be close together because you're jumping from the 7th fret to the 12th fret in a single motion.

The verse section stays mostly on the A and D strings with power chords, palm muted heavily. The chorus opens up into fuller strumming. Keep your picking hand relaxed when you transition from the verse to the chorus, or it sounds sloppy really fast. One thing nobody mentions in beginner tabs: the song uses a fair amount of dissonance. There are places where the guitar bends notes slightly out of tune intentionally, which gives it that tense, grinding quality. The studio version is heavily distorted and compressed, so individual note articulation gets lost. When you play it clean, it sounds totally different than expected. Turn up the gain and the dissonant intervals start to blend together the way Matt Bellamy intended. A practical problem I ran into was the bridge section. The tab online showed a series of descending notes that didn't match what I was hearing. Turns out the recording layers two guitar parts, and most tabs just pick one. I ended up using my ears to figure out the second layer, which goes a whole step lower than the main riff. Playing both together is where the sound actually comes alive.

For a download link, I'd skip the sketchy free tab sites. Most of them are outdated or incorrect. The official Muse songbook has it, and it's accurate. If you don't want to buy a book, there are a few reputable subscription services like Songsterr or Ultimate Guitar that have verified versions of this tab with playback so you can check your work against the track in real time. The main downsides to learning this from tab alone are the timing nuances and the bends. Tabs don't capture how long you hold a bend or how much pitch you push it. I'd recommend watching a video tutorial alongside the tab to get the feel right. The riff is mechanically straightforward but rhythmically tricky, and that's where most people struggle.