Total Guitar's Best Guitar Rock Riffs

[auad]

01. Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns N' Roses
02. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
03. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
04. Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple
05. Enter Sandman - Metallica
06. Layla - Derek & The Dominoes/Eric Clapton
07. Master Of Puppets - Metallica
08. Back In Black - AC/DC
09. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix
10. Paranoid - Black Sabbath
11. Crazy Train - Ozzy Osbourne
12. All Right Now - Free
13. Plug In Baby - Muse
14. Black Dog - Led Zeppelin
15. Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love - Van Halen
16. Walk This Way - Aerosmith w Run DMC
17. Sunshine Of Your Love - Cream
18. No-One Knows - Queens Of The Stone Age
19. Paradise City - Guns N' Roses
20. Killing In The Name - Rage Against The Machine

 

http://whiplash.net/materias/melhores/018489.html

[bedilkaromawar]

OMG no...this must be kiddin

[DTV88]

As much as I love Slash, Smoke On The Water and Whole Lotta Love are the top 2 for me. This list seems more like click bait than anything else.

[Eric Cantona]

Smells Like Teen Shit shouldn't be anywhere near that list. There are a lot of riffs that are much better than Paradise imo

[tsinindy]

So many great riffs in rock history.  The thing that cracks me about this list is:

"Walk This Way"  Aerosmith with Run DMC (like the riff wasn't great on the original, but it is on the remake....with a rap band lol).

sweet emotion is their best riff anyway. 

[Italian girl]

SCOM of course

Edited December 14, 2016 by Italian girl

[StrangerInThisTown]

Dumb list. Seems they go by popularity of the choosen songs more than by actual quality or greatness of a riff. Smells like teen spirit is one of the most important songs of all time, but that doesnt mean its riff is good. Infact I feel really dumb playing that riff on my guitar it's so simple, absolutely nothing outstanding about it. And a power ballad riff is #1, what a joke. SCOM isnt a rock riff. Jungle deserves to be #1

[xBrownstonex]

No one knows? Yea right. Who made that list? A coldplay fan?

[Nicklord]

14 minutes ago, xBrownstonex said:

No one knows? Yea right. Who made that list? A coldplay fan?

What? There are probably exactly 7 people on this planet who like both QOTSA and Coldplay

[xBrownstonex]

I love qotsa. But that song is nowhere near one of the best riffs ever

[Swedish]

I hate these kind of lists...

It's a list of 20 famous songs with a somewhat iconic riff, not a list with the 20 best riffs.

[Silverburst80]

This list should be called...

Here's some popular/radio friendly riffs from some bands you may have heard of.

Edited December 14, 2016 by Silverburst80

[thunderram]

Any list a publication or person comes up is going to be ridiculed for including or missing something.

A "best anything" list is always subjective (to an individual opinion) and most people are going to disagree over it. That's precisely the point and why they publish these things. To get people talking and arguing.

Edited December 15, 2016 by thunderram

[Towelie]

Do these lists always have to be so predictable though? It's just laziness. You'd think there was only ever two dozen good rock riffs ever written, the way it's the same old stuff being included time and time again. Why not shine a light on some of the lesser known, but arguably superior riffs?

No way is Paranoid the best Sabbath riff for example. If you want something iconic, go with Iron Man or War Pigs or even Black Sabbath (the song). That last one is so simple, but so effective.

And then you have lesser known Iommi riffs like Megalomania, Children Of The Grave or Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, all of which piss over Paranoid.

Edited December 14, 2016 by Towelie

[EvH]

Lol only one from AC/DC. Fuck right off 

[Towelie]

3 minutes ago, EvH said:

Lol one from AC/DC. Fuck right off 

Fixed that for ya.

[EvH]

Just now, Towelie said:

Fixed that for ya.

Thanks for clarifying the limits of your tastes 

[SlashElvisTCB]

Don't Damn Me is a killer riff, a killer Slash riff and one of the coolest riffs anyone has ever done in my opinion and one that is I think both harder than Sweet Child to do and gives you more accomplishment as a guitarist to learn, but I'm cool with Sweet Child Being #1 because you'd be fucking kidding yourself to say "Popularity doesn't matter to how great a song is"....it kinda does, you're pleasing a more diverse crowd and that always kicks ass and its one you'd tout yourself if you wrote the fucking song. In a group of well known songs, to have your well known song with such an iconic riff that instantly gets people going (even when a poorly skilled cover band pops it off) a song that speaks to their soul and has such meaning... you're a god damn fool if you can deny the power of that. 

What good is a great riff if the majority of people have never heard it? Saying popularity doesn't matter is usually the losers way of making excuses for why his opinion isn't wrong or in this case why his favorite song doesn't suck. Its certainly hard to say that popularity means something today with how crappy all that popular rap and hip hop crap has gotten, but still when you pull yourself away from the fads theres the music that rises above that through time. The Fox song everyone thought was a fad, I thought wtf when I first heard it, but its actually a very genius song and years later I can appreciate why it got popular. 

The purpose of the list is to choose from songs that are very well known and take the best out of those. There can still be awesome riffs, but never underestimate the minds of millions of people's ability to choose a song that speaks to our basic primal urges. 

[DTV88]

20 minutes ago, Towelie said:

Do these lists always have to be so predictable though? It's just laziness. You'd think there was only ever two dozen good rock riffs ever written, the way it's the same old stuff being included time and time again. Why not shine a light on some of the lesser known, but arguably superior riffs?

No way is Paranoid the best Sabbath riff for example. If you want something iconic, go with Iron Man or War Pigs or even Black Sabbath (the song). That last one is so simple, but so effective.

And then you have lesser known Iommi riffs like Megalomania, Children Of The Grave or Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, all of which piss over Paranoid.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, always loved that one!

[RussTCB]

These lists are what they are. They're generally made by someone no real clue and they're mostly for the clicks.

[AlexC]

Anyone else think it's a shame that some really great riffs appear in mediocre songs? Like Seven Nation Army and Clubfoot. Just a thought.

[Swedish]

7 hours ago, AlexC said:

Anyone else think it's a shame that some really great riffs appear in mediocre songs? Like Seven Nation Army and Clubfoot. Just a thought.

Yeah, Big Foot by Alcatrazz (with Yngwie Malmsteen) for example. That song has in my opinion one of the greatest riffs ever written but the song itself is utter shit.

[DR DOOM]

13 hours ago, RussTCB said:

These lists are what they are. They're generally made by someone no real clue and they're mostly for the clicks.

This.

They're all infuriatingly erratic and stupid too.

9 hours ago, AlexC said:

Anyone else think it's a shame that some really great riffs appear in mediocre songs? Like Seven Nation Army and Clubfoot. Just a thought.

A lot of Gary Moore's discography is like that.

[Towelie]

11 hours ago, AlexC said:

Anyone else think it's a shame that some really great riffs appear in mediocre songs? Like Seven Nation Army and Clubfoot. Just a thought.

Anastasia by Slash & Myles is the biggest culprit of an excellent riff in an average song.

[maynard]

Have these guys stopped listening to music by 1990? I'm actually surprised there's a Muse song in there. I mean, sure Smoke on the Water has a great riff but isn't it time to give these lists a revamp? Welcome Home by Coheed and Cambria has a better riff than any of the songs listed. And it's not even my favorite CoCa song.