The most famous ripped off guitar riffs
The guitar is at the forefront of rock music. As the genre found form and people either embraced or resented it wholeheartedly, the guitar was at the centre of everything. As people listened to the blues and then heard the beginning of rock music start to take shape, they became obsessed with the six-string, the effects that could be run through it, and the music that could be made with it.
If you ask many rock music fans what the most important part of a song is, they’ll say the riff. The riff comes at the very beginning of a track and acts as a call to arms for fans nearby. The riff is where a song either stands up or falls down; it remains the focal point for most music. No pressure on the guitarist, then.
Because of the importance of a good riff, a lot of guitarists will bang their heads against the wall, trying to get the right notes together. Sometimes, the sound just doesn’t fall right, and it’s impossible to create something that will excite people, and that can work as an introduction for the song.
Of course, if you are struggling, you can always do what a lot of famous artists do… rip off less famous artists. It’s a common thread throughout rock music that lesser-known, under-the-radar musicians have had their work stolen and blown up on a large scale. Below are some examples of famous riffs that have completely ripped off others.
Famous stolen guitar riffs:
Chuck Berry – ‘Johnny B Goode’
‘Johnny B Goode’ is one of the quintessential riffs in music history. Anyone who begins learning about rock ‘n’ roll and the different songs that make up the genre will no doubt come across the track. It immediately invokes the undeniable feeling that many rock classics do. The energy put into the song and the exciting arrangement are enough to get anybody dancing.
However, the famous riff that kicks things off and has become synonymous with the song might not have been a Chuck Berry original. Nine years earlier, Louis Lordan released ‘Ain’t That Just Like A Woman’, which sounds identical. The tempo is already more or less the same; all you need to do is change the key and add a bit of overdrive, and you have ‘Johnny B Goode’.
The Beatles – ‘Revolution’
The Beatles were some of the greatest songwriters in the world. This applies to them as both lyricists and musicians. However, given the pressure they were under to make music, it’s not surprising that they borrowed ideas from other artists occasionally.
‘Revolution’ sounds a bit like the aforementioned ‘Johnny B Goode’, but there is another riff this song takes from much more than that of Chuck Berry (or Louis Lordan). When you listen to the timing of the song, all the way down to the snare hits that lace the running shredding notes; you can tell that it’s a rip off of blues guitarist Pee Wee Crayton’s track ‘Do Unto Others’, which was released 14 years prior.
Nirvana – ‘Come As You Are’
For many guitarists, ‘Come As You Are’ is the first riff they learn. Its haunting nature and the brooding atmosphere it lends itself to means it’s perfect for all first-time guitarists. However, many mess up when playing this song, as they do it a bit too quickly. When this happens, you realise the riff is a duplicate of a track that came before it.
‘Come As You Are’ is an intricate riff, but if you speed it up and add a slight overdrive, it becomes a carbon copy of ‘Eighties’ by Killing Joke. Given that Killing Joke were a famous post-punk band with an aggressive energy, it’s not insurmountable that Kurt Cobain would have been a fan.
The Beatles – ‘I Feel Fine’
This is the second time The Beatles appear on this list. Throughout their career, the band constantly met other musicians, listened to music, and wrote music. They had such a heavy quota to meet, and a schedule that was so jam-packed with a sound that it can’t be that surprising some unoriginal ideas might have made it onto their discography.
On ‘I Feel Fine’, the riff is a complete rip off of Bobby Parker’s ‘Watch Your Step’. Every note can be linked back to Bobby Parker’s original, and though the songs veer in slightly different directions after that, there is no denying that they both have exactly the same jumping-off point.
Deep Purple – ‘Smoke On The Water’
When asked about writing the most famous riff of all time, Ritchie Blackmore was always adamant that it was Beethoven’s fifth played backwards. This didn’t surprise many, given that Blackmore was classically trained and Deep Purple was happy to work with stringed instruments.
If you reverse Beethoven and change the tempo slightly, it sounds a bit like ‘Smoke On The Water’. However, the track doesn’t match up as much as people would like. It needs a lot of tweaking before it remotely resembles the rock classic. What is more likely is that Ritchie Blackmore took the riff from Carlos Lyra and his song ‘Maria Moita’, which sounds like an exact copy of the Deep Purple classic.
