Here is a brief excerpt of the guitar sound that provides the foundation of It's No Good.
At the time this was recorded, I had only one faithful guitar - the Ibanez Talman TCY15. I believe it's not sold anymore, but it sort of looks like this (this is the TCY10):
It is an electric-acoustic guitar with a piezo pickup. When I bought it, I was really captivated by its mysterious looks and gorgeous black design. It is a true hybrid, since it's got the size and shape of an electric, but the sound of a full-body acoustic. I really don't use it for acoustic purposes though, and I love feeding it through regular electric guitar stomp box effects to get crazy sounds out of it.
For It's No Good, I used a POD 2.0 (see below) to do the guitar amp simulation, since at that time I didn't really own an amp (If I did, I would've probably been evicted from school  ). The one tone that I really love on this box is the Black Panel sound. It is simply an amazingly gorgeous clean amp sound, emulating the classic Fender Deluxe tone. I added a touch of flanger on top and that was it - a very simple setup, which produced a glorious guitar tone.
I don't remember how I came up with the signature riff. I was probably just messing around with the song's chords or something. Somebody once told me that the riff reminded them of the Zephyr Mix version of In Your Room. Perhaps I subconsciously based it on that song? (By the way, In Your Room is my favorite Depeche Mode song)
Several things can be observed from the excerpt I've provided here. First, I really didn't pay too much attention to how I was playing the notes (this short clip is from the second verse of the song), which is very untypical of how I work with my songs, since I am usually an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist when it comes to making music. Second, you can probably figure out the basic chords I am playing here easily:
Cmin - A# - G# - A#
This is what I use throughout most of the song (and that's what the original version uses during the verses). One difference here is an inclusion of an Gmin chord, which can be heard in the excerpt at position 0:18. This is sort of my little contribution to the song's melodic structure. 
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