How does one craft a riff or a lead? The process may be different depending on which musician to talk to, but during this edition of Loudwire's Gear Factor, Halestorm's Lzzy Hale reveals to the Music Experience's Squiggy that her vocals play a key role in how her guitar parts sound.

In the midst of a discussion on her favorite riffs, Hale brought up "I Miss the Misery" and how it was a key turning point for her creatively. "What I love about ‘I Miss the Misery’ is that we decided to do just kind of a melodic riff on top of that that just went with my vocals. This was when I was discovering that I could sing and play at the same time. You learn you can harmonize with yourself and there was a lightbulb that happened in my mind," says Hale.

She went on to add, "What I need to do is chase what gets me excited instead of trying to chase something that makes everybody think that I’m this or I’m that. I’m not going to be Yngwie Malmsteen, but what I can be is me," says the singer guitarist, who revealed, "Even when I’m doing leads, it’s based on things that I can sing. So when I’m writing riffs and I’m writing leads, it’s coming from this vocalist standpoint ... I’ve always been a much more natural singer than I am a guitar player, so instead of thinking of that as my handicap, I think of it as my secret weapon.”

In this episode, Hale also speaks of her musical upbringing, calling herself "an abnormal kid" who was getting into Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath and Dio while her friends were into TLC and Backstreet Boys. She credits her parents for starting her on hard rock and metal early, with her dad teaching her to play Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell," which she can still handle quite well.

But her mother didn't want Lzzy to think rock was just for boys only, so a healthy supply of Joan Jett, Heart and Pat Benatar followed. “So then you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I can do both of these things.’ And then from there, this is how I operated, I was writing my own songs and I just started showing my dad riffs that I had made, so what I started doing was that I started having these small show and tells for family. Like, check this out."

Hale reveals one of the first riff she ever wrote as a teenager turned into "It's Not You," and gave her the confidence to continue on at a young age. "When I started doing that as a teenager, I was like, ‘Well shit, when is the soonest I can start doing this out with my band?’"

Watch more of Lzzy Hale's Gear Factor episode below. Halestorm are continuing support of their Vicious album. Check out their tour dates here.

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