The Greatest Guitar Riffs Of All Time – Revealed!

By TeamRock

October 6, 2017

For this year's World Guitar Day we asked you to voted for the Greatest Riffs Of All Time. With over 33,000 votes cast, here is the full list of the top 100. Below are the 20 all-time greatest riffs, the stories behind them, and even – in some cases – how to play them.

Interesting facts? AC/DC and Led Zeppelin both have three entries in the top 20, and singer Ozzy Osbourne appears on three of the tracks in the top 20. But the Kings Of The Riff are Metallica – the Bay Area thrash band that went on to be the biggest band in metal appear four times in the top 20 alone...

20) LA GRANGE

ZZ Top

Ah-how-how-how-how. There’s a one-chord blues trick to this 1973 ZZ classic, which is musically inspired by a John Lee Hooker number, Boogie Chillen. But the vibe of the track is all ZZ. The storyline itself was inspired by a notorious brothel which was just outside the town of La Grange in Texas. Commonly known as the Chicken Ranch, this place of, erm, entertainment was immortalised still further in the movie The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas – and closed when the authorities got wind. Have mercy.

19) FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

Metallica

From the moment that Cliff Burton joined the band, Metallica began to appreciate that ‘speed’ and ‘heaviness’ were not the same thing. For Whom The Bell Tolls may have been played at a fraction of the speed of Whiplash, but its atmospheric, dark drama bestowed genuine gravitas upon the San Franciscan quartet for the first time. On Ride The Lightning’s spacious, dynamic third track the chorus riff is simplicity itself, based around palm-muted E-string chugging and fat, ringing power chords, but it has a weight and power that helped birth the ‘90s Metallica sound.

18) VOODOO CHILD (SLIGHT RETURN)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Voodoo Chile is the freewheeling blues jam that ends side one of Electric Ladyland. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) is the one with The Riff. The album closer with The Riff that fades in on a wah-wah'd chug before exploding into apocalyptic menace. It's a riff that sounds like a riot kicking off (and has been used in several movies to soundtrack exactly that).

If the riff sounded like the end of the world, the lyrics were built to match. The final line goes: ‘And if I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one/Don’t be late.’ They were the final words he ever sang in public.

17) BLACK DOG

Led Zeppelin

The call and response riff of the opening track of Led Zeppelin IVwas the perfect way to open one of rock's most perfect albums. The almost impossible-to-copy rhythmic swing of the track (4/4 time set against 5/4) was a key indication of how far ahead of the rock game Led Zeppelin really were. Back in the day, bands such as Grand Funk Railroad were touted as being successors to Zep’s heavyweight crown, but their approach was devoid of the grace and timing of something like Black Dog. Genius.

16) HIGHWAY TO HELL

AC/DC

One of three entries from the Youngs in the top 20, Highway To Hellwas the first song the band worked on for the album of the same name. The instantly arresting guitar-drum intro had been demoed with just Angus grinding away on guitar while Malcolm bashed at the drums. All was nearly lost when an engineer took the only cassette of it home, where his young son playfully unravelled it. Fortunately, Bon, who was always rewinding his own worn-out cassettes, put it back together the following day and the tune that was about to transform all their lives was restored.The fact that the intro sounded like Free’s All Right Now was not lost on producer Mutt Lange, who hired Free’s old engineer Tony Platt to help him mix the final edits. “He was looking for someone that would give it that kind of dry, punchy rock thing,” says Platt now. “That feeling of time and space.” Simple and timeless.

15) PURPLE HAZE

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Purple Haze is one of the riffs that changed the world. The second single from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, it was the first Hendrix original released as an A-side. Where debut single Hey Joe was an anchored by a gentle melodicism, Purple Haze was brutal, angular, awkward. It signalled not just a new voice in music and guitar playing, but the arrival of a new kind of music.

Purple Haze featured the first use of Roger Mayer’s Octavia pedal. "The basis was the blues, but the framework of the blues was too tight," said Mayer. "We’d talk first about what he wanted the emotion of the song to be. What’s the vision? He would talk in colours and my job was to give him the electronic palette which would engineer those colours so he could paint the canvas."

Purple Haze's frazzled psychedelia swept like a broom through the London of 1967 and blew the quaint niceties of the British blues out the window. Move over, Rover, and let Jimi take over.

14) CREEPING DEATH

Metallica

What is it that hits you hardest about Creeping Death? Take a second to think about it, because this thrash metal journey has plenty going for it. Is it that thunderous, thudding introduction that shoots adrenaline through your veins, getting straight to the point and setting the riotous tone from the very first note of the song? Maybe it’s that middle section that slugs away like body blows from a heavyweight boxer and includes what could very well be the most definitive gang vocal ever recorded? The epic scale and tone of the guitar solos? The dual guitar moments that added a sophistication and element of class to the “hunt and kill” rhetoric thrash had made its forte by 1984?

Whatever it was, it was apparent upon the release of Ride The Lightning that Creeping Death was unchartered territory for both Metallica and metal as a whole.

“Creeping Death was one of the first songs responsible for the musical growth of the band, I think,” reflects Kirk Hammett. “It was one of the first songs written for Ride The Lightning and it was a clear step in the right direction. It was as heavy as anything on Kill ‘Em Allbut on a technical level, we had put that much more into the writing and arrangement and we made it more demanding for ourselves, and it set the stage for the rest of the album.”

Though the song obviously goes down as a Metallica classic, dig a little deeper and you can find that Hammett’s former band Exodus had a tiny part to play in the creation of this metal masterpiece...

“James and Lars hammered that song out in a day and then called me down to the rehearsal space,” Kirk reveals of the song’s origin. “They got to the ‘Die by my hand’ riff and they started grinning at me and I laughed because I’d had that riff kicking around for so long and we’d used it in an Exodus demo, but it just worked in Creeping Death so well. I wrote it when I was 16 years old, definitely still in high school, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is heavier than a lot of the bands that I listen to,’ and thought I’d touched upon something. It was the first riff I ever wrote that was in that sphere and I’ll always have tremendous affinity with it for that reason.”

13) THUNDERSTRUCK

AC/DC

For 1990's The Razor's Edge album producer Bruce Fairbairn, the man who had revitalised Aerosmith’s career three years before with Permanent Vacation, took Angus Young to one side: “I want you to sound like AC/DC when you were seventeen,” he said. Nowhere was that trademark sound captured better than on the album's opener, Thunderstruck. Introduced by an electrifying Angus Young riff, comprised of hammer-on and pull-off fingering on an open B string, the track builds dynamically using terrace chants and new drummer Chris Slade’s brutal but simplistic poundings to emerge as a state-of-the-art stadium leveller. Not for nothing do the band Thunder use it as their intro music.

12) ACE OF SPADES

Motorhead

Some bands will tell you about the great ordeals they went through to come up with their greatest works. The inner torment. The drug-fuelled inspiration. The divine light that guided them. Not Motorhead.

“We went down to Rockfield for a couple of weeks, got in the vodka and everything else,” says guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke. “Unfortunately, Lemmy wasn’t too up for rehearsing in those days – he had a nice bird up there with him, so he was distracted. But Phil [drummer ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor] and I used to like playing, so after we’d finished fishing and fucking about and God knows what, me and Phil would have a little bash. It gave us an opportunity to work out some riffs.”

Ace Of Spades was one of them. Pushed by producer Vic Maile, that steel-plated central riff was gradually burnished to perfection. “Vic kind of questioned what we were doing with the song,” says Clarke. “He made us look at that riff, so Lemmy and I started fucking around with it a bit. It was one of the only times we’d written in the studio.”

11) IRON MAN

Black Sabbath

Now that's a riff. Tony Iommi in excelsis. Black Sabbath had groove when they needed to, but heavy metal really came into its own when it took the roll out of rock'n'roll. Iron Man is like someone looking at Led Zeppelin's fancy dan folk-and-blues genre-mashing complexity and going... Nah. Get a load of THIS! Defiant and deathly cool, it's textbook Route One riffing from the Metal Master.

The song, written by bassist Geezer Butler, is not named after the Marvel character of the same name. And it could have been called something very different. “I can’t exactly recall what Ozzy said," Geezer told Classic Rock, "but it was something like: ‘Why don’t we do a song called Iron Man, or maybe Iron Bloke’."

10) CRAZY TRAIN

Ozzy Osbourne

Ladies and gentlemen: meet Randy Rhoads.

Greg Leon was a young LA guitarist when he met Randy Rhoads backstage at a Quiet Riot and Van Halen concert in 1976. “I’m 17 and I’m the hotshot guitar player in Glendale. But I saw Randy and went: ‘Oh, man!',” says Leon. “He just had that aura about him.” When Rhoads left Quiet Riot, he recommended Leon as his replacement. The grateful Leon repaid the favour by later helping Randy write what would become one of his signature riffs with Ozzy Osbourne: Crazy Train.

“We were hanging out, and I showed him the riff to Steve Miller’s Swingtown,” he says. “I said: ‘Look what happens when you speed this riff up’. We messed around, and the next thing I know he took it to a whole other level and end up writing the Crazy Train riff.”

Having been ousted from Black Sabbath, Ozzy’s first solo single had to prove that he was still worthy of his Prince Of Darkness title. Randy Rhoads was the sideman he needed. Crazy Train fused a bass line reminiscent of Papa Was A Rolling Stone with one of metal’s greatest guitar riffs and solos.

"I wish I’d written Crazy Train," Bowling For Soup's Jaret Reddick told us, "because I love the overall guitar aspect to it. It’s the song that got me into music. It’s the reason I asked for a drum set and started listening to metal music. And it’s funny because when I was a kid Ozzy was the Prince of Darkness and the devil, and now you hear Crazy Train at every sporting event and you have kids singing it in commercials on television. It’s a song that draws everybody together worldwide. That’s crazy.”