Top Ten CATCHIEST Guitar Riffs EVER!

Do you ever walk around all day with a guitar riff stuck in your head? A real ear worm that just won’t leave you alone? As a musician, that’s when you know you’re onto something: when you’ve written a part so undeniably catchy that it lingers in the brain for days, replaying over and over again.

That’s what today’s article is all about: the catchiest riffs ever. Not best, smartest or hardest to play: just the ones with the catchiest hooks. I’ve got ten for you today, so check out the list and see how many you agree with!

Whether you’ve heard this in its original form or as the remade version with Run DMC, the riff remains the same, and what a catchy riff that is! It’s simple blues scale stuff, written as a sort of call-and-response, which is a great method for getting our brains subconsciously involved in things.

Most of Hank’s melodic playing displays a strong knack for memorable hooks, but Apache is the one that everybody in the known universe instantly recognises. Heavily sampled and remade over the years, the twangy original remains the best way to experience that nostalgic magic.

The Eagles - the band best known for prodigious substance abuse and for hating each other - also put out some excellent guitar anthems. This one, penned mostly by Joe Walsh, contains a slinky little cracker of an intro riff that gets your hips swaying instantly.

This three note blast of fuzz - inspired by Motown horn sections - is one of the catchiest and most well-known riffs in the history of music. Keith used a Gibson Maestro fuzz to get that particularly ‘janky’ tone, which he cleverly does not over-do within the body of the song.

It’s a toss-up between Satisfaction and this one for the best known guitar riff ever, I reckon. Smoke on the Water is so ingrained in our culture that you hear it in beer and car adverts, sport events and all kinds of other situations when a jolt of cool-yet-familiar ‘guitar action’ is needed.

It’s one of the first riffs that new players gravitate towards too, because it’s simple to play and makes you sound like a rock star!

This always pops up in blogs like this because the lead riff is just so catchy! Duane Allman’s tasteful note choices and sense of dramatic delivery really give this song an identity, perhaps even elevating it. Would it be as memorable a song without that guitar riff? I don’t think so!

This ‘go to’ Sabbath song is perhaps not their greatest, even though it’s the one that is often reached for in press coverage. It’s not even their best riff, but that’s only because Tony Iommi wrote more amazing guitar riffs than any other musician! What it is, is Black Sabbath’s catchiest riff, and the one that all the casual fans know about.

Trivia: lots of people play this riff wrong! They may be following Geezer Butler’s bass part, but yes, you need to go down in pitch at the end of the phrase, from the D to the B note. It’s another great example of call & response, one of the oldest and most effective tricks in the book.

A rare case of a catchy riff having more than five notes, the superlative intro to this G ‘n’ R classic is supremely recognisable. It’s fancy enough to be impressive and simple enough to be super-catchy. The melodic bass part underneath it is actually nearly as catchy too, proving that Slash and Duff were a lot more than just a pair of wild guys on the Sunset Strip!

We don’t often look to The Fab Four for riff moments, even though their songs are full of guitars. As writers, they were all master hook-creators (it’s the primary reason for their wide appeal), and Day Tripper demonstrates this with style.

To my ears, this sounds a bit like Oh, Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, a song that was actually bumped off this list in favour of this Beatles one!

He was a lot of impressive things - incredible singer, great songwriter, stylish dresser, reasonable actor - but guitar hero isn’t ever something that people called David Bowie.

Still, when it came time to kill off Ziggy Stardust and continue without his backing band the Spiders From Mars, Bowie recruited himself as the main guitarist for Diamond Dogs.

His faith in himself was well founded: the stupendously catchy guitar riff to Rebel Rebel (indeed, the entire song hangs on it) is his own invention.