A catchy riff — whether it be on guitar, bass, synthesizer or some other instrument — can take a song from good to legendary. Just ask some of the artists we’ve listed below.
These are riffs that in some way are integral to the song itself. Without them, there is nothing to drive the track along, nothing for the singer to push up against and nothing all that memorable (or least much less) for a listener to hum along to.
Read on for our Top 30 Rock Riffs — good luck getting them out of your head afterward.
30. Rush, “The Spirit of Radio”
From: Permanent Waves (1980)
Rush’s “The Spirit of Radio” takes its title from the slogan of the Toronto-based radio station CFNY-FM, so the riff, guitarist Alex Lifeson told Classic Rock in 2021, was meant to add to that theme. “I just wanted to give it something that gave it a sense of static – radio waves bouncing around, very electric,” he explained. “We had that sequence going underneath, and it was just really to try and get something that was sitting on top of it, that gave it that movement.”
29. Led Zeppelin, “Immigrant Song”
From: Led Zeppelin III (1970)
We could probably make a whole other separate list of incredible riffs written by Jimmy Page, but to begin, we present “Immigrant Song,” which features a relentless, borderline barbaric guitar part. When the song was used in School of Rock starring Jack Black, Robert Plant noted the following (via Vulture): “It’s a killer guitar riff. What a shame ‘Immigrant Song’ isn’t easy for kids to play, by the way.”
28. New Order, “Age of Consent”
From: Power, Corruption & Lies (`1983)
When Joy Division ended in 1980 and New Order began not long after, there was a marked shift in the way the band approached their music. “Age of Consent,” with its propelling, easy-to-dance-to guitar riff is evidence of that. “There’s a heaviness and an intensity in Joy Division that suits the ’70s. The ’80’s were lighter and more melodic, more forward looking — certainly more interesting—and quite innovative as well,” bassist Peter Hook explained to Stereo Embers Magazine in 2013. “I think New Order sort of mirrored that as well in a way.”
27. Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing”
From: Brothers in Arms (1985)
If you have ever wondered why Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” has a sort of ZZ Top-like quality to the guitar parts, that’s because Mark Knopfler did some research, literally calling up Billy Gibbons for advice. The riff itself doesn’t enter the picture until roughly 30 seconds into the song, but when it does it’s instantly recognizable.
26. Blue Oyster Cult, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper”
From: Agents of Fortune (1976)
Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser does not really understand how or why the riff to “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” occurred to him, it just did. “The riff came out of the ether; it just came to my fingers,” he told Mix in 2009. “Then the first two lines of the lyrics came the same way. I recorded some of the vocals, and then the idea of the song came to me. That was my first experience with multitrack recording. It definitely changed the way Blue Oyster Cult wrote and arranged songs. Once we started writing songs using the multitrack recorders, our demos got more fleshed-out and thought-through.”
25. Pink Floyd, “Money”
From: The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
When Roger Waters wrote “Money” and brought it to his band, there were a lot of directions that could have been taken. The path that was ultimately chosen was one of innovation. “It’s Roger’s riff,” David Gilmour explained to Guitar World in 1993. “Roger came in with the verses and lyrics to ‘Money’ more or less completed. And we just made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs – we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4.”
24. Montrose, “Rock Candy”
From: Montrose (1973)
“Riffs are riffs, you know? They come out.” That’s what Ronnie Montrose said to Guitar Player in 2013, speaking about the “Rock Candy” riff that he said “just came out of my head” one day in the studio. “If you don’t remember it the next day, it’s not a song anymore.”
23. The Beatles, “Day Tripper”
From: 1965 Single
The Beatles may have stood out from dozens of other bands in the ’60s but one thing they had in common with the others was their love and appreciation of rock acts that came before them — people like Little Richard, Chuck Berry and more. “That’s mine,” John Lennon said in a 1980 interview with writer David Sheff, referring to 1965’s “Day Tripper,” which is based around an ascending guitar riff. “Including the lick, the guitar break and the whole bit. It’s just a rock ‘n’ roll song.”
22. Tom Petty, “Runnin’ Down a Dream”
From: Full Moon Fever (1989)
If you’re going to open a song with lyrics about driving along with cruise control with the radio on, like Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” you better include a great riff along with it. In this case, it served as the catalyst for the entire song. “[Guitarist Mike Campbell] had that riff but in a different time signature. It was kind of a broken beat, much slower,” Petty explained in 2005’s Conversations With Tom Petty. “I liked the lick a lot, and I’d sit around, playing it on my guitar, experimenting with it in different ways. I came to think it sounded good in a really straight beat, really fast. And I played it for Jeff [Lynne], one night when he was over at my house, and he said ‘Oh, that’s good. That might be one of those last riffs left. [Laughs]”
21. Van Halen, “Panama”
From: 1984 (1984)
The robust guitar riff you hear in “Panama” was Eddie Van Halen‘s attempt to write something in the vein of another band you’ll see later on in this list. “When the guys once asked me to write something with an AC/DC beat, that ended up being ‘Panama,'” the guitarist said to Guitar World in 2014. “It really doesn’t sound that much like AC/DC, but that was my interpretation of it. … I always start with some intro or theme and establish a riff, then after the solo there’s some kind of breakdown section. That’s there in almost every song, or else it returns to the intro.”
20. The Police, “Every Breath You Take”
From: Synchronicity (1983)
While in the studio recording 1983’s Synchronicity, Sting and Stewart Copeland of the Police struggled to find a way to make “Every Breath You Take” work, to the point where the song was nearly discarded entirely. In a last ditch effort, Andy Summers plugged in his guitar and out came the now-iconic guitar riff. “And of course, the fucking thing went right around the world, straight to No. 1 in America,” Summers recalled to Guitar World in 2022. “And the riff has become a kind of immortal guitar part that all guitar players have to learn.”
19. Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”
From: Toys in the Attic (1975)
In late 1974, Aerosmith traveled to Hawaii where they were booked to open for the Guess Who. “During the sound check, I was fooling around with riffs and thinking about the Meters,” guitarist Joe Perry told The Wall Street Journal in 2014. “I asked Joey [Kramer] to lay down something flat with a groove on the drums. The guitar riff to what would become ‘Walk This Way’ just came off my hands.”
Then Steven Tyler appeared. “When I heard Joe playing that riff during the sound check, I ran out and sat behind the drums and we jammed,” he added. “I rattled off the beat and just felt the song. Joe and I did this all the time when we wrote.”
18. AC/DC, “You Shook Me All Night Long”
From: Back in Black (1980)
Within the first 20 or so seconds of AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” the riff is well established. That riff was written by Malcolm Young, who handed things off to the band’s brand new singer Brian Johnson, asking him to write lyrics for it. The result was AC/DC’s very first single with Johnson, a Top 40 hit.
17. Neil Young, “Cinnamon Girl”
From: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
“Cinnamon Girl” is one of several songs Neil Young wrote while at home suffering from the flu. Evidently it wasn’t all that difficult: check out this video of Young teaching a fellow guitarist in a park how to play the iconic riff.
16. Ted Nugent, “Stranglehold”
From: Ted Nugent (1975)
At one point, Ted Nugent’s record label urged him not to include “Stranglehold” on his debut, self-titled album because, as Nugent recalled in 2024, “it doesn’t have a chorus, and nobody is gonna play an eight-minute song with all that ‘guitar part’ in it.’” Obviously, he did not heed that advice and went ahead with the riff-driven track anyway, and it worked out in his favor.
15. The Who, “I Can’t Explain”
From: 1964 Single
The cool thing about being a rock ‘n’ roll band in the ’60s was that there was so much music being made by fellow bands to absorb and take inspiration from. This is more or less how Pete Townshend came up with the riff in “I Can’t Explain,” a bit he came up with after hearing “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks. “He went home and tried to play it,” Who bassist John Entwistle said in a 1994 interview with Mojo, “but what he came up with was the riff that became ‘I Can’t Explain.'”
14. Free, “All Right Now”
From: Fire and Water (1970)
Sometimes, a bad experience serves as the fuel for something better. Such was the case when Free played a miserable show in Durham, England early on in their career — cold, rainy and only a few dozen people in the audience. Afterward bassist Andy Fraser was struck with a little bit of hopeful inspiration. “The chords of the song were basically me trying to do my Pete Townshend impression,” Fraser told Songwriting magazine in 2013. “I actually wrote the riff on piano and then [Paul] Kossoff transposed the chords to guitar, and he did a helluva job because that’s not always easy. Basically the chorus wrote itself, the chords took me about 10-15 minutes and then Paul [Rodgers] came up with the verses while he was waiting for a lift to a gig the next day.”
13. ZZ Top, “La Grange”
From: Tres Hombres (1973)
“The genesis and, of course, the heart of [“La Grange”] was that boogie backbeat, which everybody and their brother has learned how to play,” Billy Gibbons told Guitar Player in 2021. “La Grange” was based on John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen,'” so much so that there was a failed lawsuit by the copyright holder in 1992.
“Who would have thought that something so simple and severely compressed structure-wise would lead us on such a grand journey?” Gibbons continued in 2021. “From that cornerstone backbeat, our little song seemed to resonate and catch on with the masses, which has allowed us to chase it for going on five decades now.”
12. David Bowie, “Rebel, Rebel”
From: Diamond Dogs (1974)
There’s lots of fun to be had in the music business but there’s also plenty of competition. When David Bowie came up with a rough idea for a new guitar riff, he immediately thought of another energetic frontman and brought it to guitarist Alan Parker for help with fleshing it out. “He said, I’ve got this riff and it’s a bit Rolling Stonesy – I just want to piss Mick [Jagger] off a bit,'” Parker told Uncut in 2014. “I spent about three-quarters of an hour to an hour with him working on the guitar riff – he had it almost there, but not quite. We got it there, and he said, ‘Oh, we’d better do a middle…’ So he wrote something for the middle, put that in. Then he went off and sorted some lyrics.”
11. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Purple Haze”
From: 1967 Single
The thing about Jimi Hendrix is that riffs just seemed to pour out of him as naturally as spoken sentences. The one found in “Purple Haze” is just one of them. Hendrix hummed the riff a bit to his bandmates Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding in the studio and they finished recording it in just a handful of takes.
10. Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train”
From: Blizzard of Oz (1980)
Never underestimate the power of collaboration. Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist Randy Rhoads and Greg Leon, Rhoads’ replacement in Quiet Riot, came up with an awfully memorable lick one day. “We were hanging out, and I showed him the riff to Steve Miller‘s ‘Swingtown,'” Leon told Classic Rock in 2012. “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.”
9. Derek and the Dominoes, “Layla”
From: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970)
“Layla” is credited to Derek and the Dominoes, and those lyrics are Eric Clapton‘s, but the riff is the work of Duane Allman, who supposedly based it on a song by blues legend Albert King called “As the Years Go Passing By.” In total, there are six tracks of guitar on “Layla,” according to producer Tom Dowd: “There’s an Eric rhythm part; three tracks of Eric playing harmony with himself on the main riff; one of Duane playing that beautiful bottleneck; and one of Duane and Eric locked up, playing countermelodies.”
8. Black Sabbath, “Iron Man”
From: Paranoid (1970)
By now, you’ve probably noticed a pattern in this list: many of the riffs were not premeditated, and in fact, seemed to drop out of the sky. This happened to Tony Iommi as well when he heard his Black Sabbath bandmate Bill Ward casually drumming something out. Iommi joined in and before he knew it, he’d come up with the iconic “Iron Man” lick.
“Most of the riffs I’ve done I’ve come up with on the spot, and that was one of them – it just came up,” he explained to Songfacts. “It went with the drum, what Bill was playing. I just saw this thing in my mind of someone creeping up on you, and it just sounded like the riff. In my head I could hear it as a monster, so I came up with that riff there and then.”
7. Cream, “Sunshine of Your Love”
From: Disraeli Gears (1967)
Here’s an instance of one riff master inspiring another. In 1967, Cream went to go see Jimi Hendrix perform in London, and that was about all bassist Jack Bruce needed in order to come up with what would become the riff for “Sunshine of Your Love.” Eric Clapton recalled the moment in a 1988 interview with Rolling Stone: “[Hendrix] played this gig that was blinding. I don’t think Jack [Bruce] had really taken him in before…and when he did see it that night, after the gig he went home and came up with the riff. It was strictly a dedication to Jimi. And then we wrote a song on top of it.”
6. Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
From: Nevermind (1991)
When Kurt Cobain first brought the bones of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to his bandmates, they were not fans, feeling as though the guitar part was cliche — more specifically, that the riff sounded like something by Boston. But Cobain felt he was on to something. “I made the band play it for an hour and a half,” he told Rolling Stone in 1994. After some workshopping, it finally became the recorded version we know today.
5. AC/DC, “Back in Black”
From: Back in Black (1980)
Back to AC/DC with “Back in Black,” which actually happens to be the song before “You Shook Me All Night Long” on the 1980 album Back in Black. This time, the central lick to “Back in Black” began as something Malcolm Young occasionally fooled around with while warming up on tour.
“I remember during the Highway to Hell tour Malcolm came in one day and played me a couple of ideas he had knocked down on cassette, and one of them was the main riff for ‘Back in Black,'” Angus Young recalled to Guitar World in 2003. “And he said, ‘Look, it’s been bugging me, this track. What do you think?’ He was going to wipe it out and reuse the tape, because cassettes were sort of a hard item for us to come by sometimes! I said, ‘Don’t trash it. If you don’t want it I’ll have it.'”
4. Led Zeppelin, “Whole Lotta Love”
From: Led Zeppelin II (1969)
Perhaps the key to writing historic rock ‘n’ roll riffs is living on a houseboat. At least, that seemed to work for Jimmy Page. “I came up with the guitar riff for ‘Whole Lotta Love’ in the summer of ’68, on my houseboat along the Thames in Pangbourne, England,” he explained to The Wall Street Journal in 2014. “I suppose my early love for big intros by rockabilly guitarists was an inspiration, but as soon as I developed the riff, I knew it was strong enough to drive the entire song, not just open it. When I played the riff for the band in my living room several weeks later during rehearsals for our first album, the excitement was immediate and collective. We felt the riff was addictive, like a forbidden thing.”
3. The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”
From: 1964 Single
It really can’t be overstated the importance of blues music on ’60s rock ‘n’ roll, particularly for young bands in the U.K. who had not previously been exposed to that kind of American music. “When I wrote ‘You Really Got Me,’ I wanted it to be a blues song,” Ray Davies explained to The Austin Chronicle in 2001. “Like a Leadbelly or a Broonzy song. But because I was a white kid from North London, I put in certain musical shifts that made it unique to what I did.”
2. Deep Purple, “Smoke on the Water”
From: Machine Head (1972)
Would you believe it if we said the iconic riff in Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” was inspired by Beethoven? That’s what Ritchie Blackmore claimed in a 2007 interview with CNN (via Guitar World): “I thought [I’d] play [Beethoven’s fifth symphony] backwards, put something to it. That’s how I came up with it.” It’s unclear whether this was an entirely truthful statement or Blackmore’s sense of humor coming out, but either way, “Smoke on the Water” was a No. 4 hit in America.
1. The Rolling Stones, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
From: 1965 Single
Rock ‘n’ roll dreams do come true. It happened to Keith Richards, who has said that the riff to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” came to him in a dream. He woke up, attempted to record it into a cassette player and went back to sleep. “I had no idea I’d written it,” he said in his 2010 memoir Life.
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Gallery Credit: Bryan Rolli
