5 Famous Guitar Riffs That Are Ripped Off

Exactly!😂

In France, it was played by Pierre Cardin, the very same year.

​@@FrancoisKerisitcette traduction n'empêche

🤣

The very first inspiration came in 1855 by Clint Eastwood. Never recorded it though...

you summed up paul davids youtube channel

His beard has always had that quality of epicness.

Watch and learn, Music is Win!!

The beard is truly epic indeed.

That beard is getting meaty, ngl

Yes I'm sure he did

Nothing wrong with that, as long as you acknowledge it.

Unconscious plagiarism blights our lives. That said, I'm reminded that when Paul McCartney came up with the tune to Yesterday in his head one morning, he was convinced it must be someone else's song, so he reportedly hummed the tune to several people to see if they recognised it. When no one did, he ascertained that he had written it in his sleep. I wish I could do that. I always wake up with other people's songs as my earworms.

😂😂😂

I don't get the 808 from hip hop, can you explain me please?!

@@merlinrabiller-lahaye6343 the 808 is a classic Roland drum machine that defined the classic hip hop sound of the 80s. :)

@@merlinrabiller-lahaye6343 I think what he means is the 808 sound of early hip hop was itself derived from the same roots eighties metal used. Saying that Iron Maiden copied 80's hip hop is funny because the 808 sound came from the same source as the 80s metal sound. They are cousins.

"My dream is to fly, over the rainbow so high"@@Bacopa68

​​@@Bacopa68the TR-808 was a flop when it first launched. The hi hats were described as "a bunch of marching anteaters". Many of the units ended up in pawn shops being sold for cheap. Hip hop artists in the ghetto found that even though the hi hats were trash, the bass drum could "boom boom shake the room" and so one man's trash became another's treasure. Then the usual thing happened. Everyone wanted one and now if you have to ask what an original TR-808 costs, you can't afford one.

Yes! Why do these people always talk about music being stolen? Who wouldn't love Nirvana or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin being inspired by your music? I would be thrilled!

​@tomm1413 ikr, like I absolutely think that og songs deserve some form of credit, but it's not stealing as long as your not copying a whole song.
Plus I would be very happy if someone remixed a song of mine (if I had one)

@@tomm1413it’s more that people say that everything nowadays is stolen while the past was just as ‘bad’. Sampling and inspiration was everywhere. It’s how music has always worked.

Can we talk about Buddy Guy’s “Mary Had A Little Lamb” sounding almost exactly like Freddie King’s “Just Picking”??

Plagiarism is theft, plain and simple.... Calling theft "inspiration" is like calling rape "sex"....but I am sure all of you KRplus commentators are part-time Copyright Attorneys .....let's just "move on"....lol

I once wrote a song and when I showed it to my friend he told me the verse was something he used to play when we roomed together, although in a different key. I had no idea I copped something I had already heard

Had the same exact thing with More than a Feeling :) But I actually never consciously heard the song, and when my buddies said "man, you're playing Boston" and I had no clue what were they talking about ;)

Something almost similar but not really happened with me as well. Couple of years ago i was having fun with my guitar, trying to come up with something new, played a couple of chords and what not, a rhythm was being created, a few minutes later a was writing down some lyrics as well. Recorded the whole thing, sent it to a friend of mine so ue can give me his feedback, he calls me and tells me "hmm, this reminds me of a song i listened to a long time ago, the intro sounds a lot like it" told him that i wasn't inspired or copied another song. Long story short, few days later he sends me a link to Rewind by Paolo Nutini, and the intro and main riff are THE EXACT SAME, it's like i did a copy-paste of it but i didn't. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that without even knowing the artist nor having listened to the song, i ended up writing the exact same riff and intro.

No5 was the peak of the video I couldn't stop laughing 😅

Well I just wrote a song on the guitar and I took some massive inspiration from the super distorted riff on Zombie

That’s what I was thinking. Hope there’s someone more talented than me who can make the full song as some kind of mash-up 😊

Man, I loved that one. Killing Joke and The Damned were amongst my favorites in HS and college. Especially The Damned. New Rose is jam (that's not mentioned, btw). I wish Captain Sensible, Damned bassist was mentioned, he should be more iconic than he is.

I remember catching part of Rosie O' Donnel's " talk show" I think approximately twenty years ago , where she sang a superimposition of the lyrics to " Amazing Grace " over the melody of the " Theme for Gilligan's Island " and IT WORKED !!!

and then add “22 faces “ by Garden of delight

Yeah sounded better thatn any thing Nirvana ever did!

Well said!

Rock and its fans sensibilities have all the attributes of trad folk music but there is a bizarre pretension for originality. All Bluegrass is ripping off Doc Watson but no one cares. Countless blues songs are fundamentally the same song but if a rock band imitates it they owe the blues man money somehow. A musical style is unoriginal by nature of what it is but because it's always been a commodity, rock in most people's minds must always be evolving. I think the real IP is the performance. There are only so many frets and people like repetition and sameness because we're cultural by nature.

That’s what made bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen and Rush (and many others) so amazing when they broke onto the scene.

Coming up with something that hasn't been done before? Good luck with that in 2023.
Just because you haven't heard of something or the composer hasn't heard of something does not mean the musical idea - or at least something remarkably similar - has not been recorded by someone already. There are easily 100+ million songs. Most of them are in 4/4 and make use of pentatonic scale or major scale or some of its modes. There are only limited number of possible combinations and even fewer combinations that sound good with a given harmony. Of course there are some truly obscure and weird songs out there, but I wouldn't say people gravitate towards them.
I think most musicians deserve the benefit of a doubt what comes to plagiarism. Once you have written a riff that is 1:1 identical to someone's else riff you'll understand. In my case I came up the riff first but never published it. I thought it was tremendously boring, so I was quite shocked when I heard the exact same riff on my father's Spotify playlist. 😄
Made me question my life choices a little bit though...

Almost all the guitarists that followed him were more or less influenced by T Bone Walker, one of the first to make electric guitar popular. He is the grandfather of them all.

Well, you know what they say;
“Talent borrows, but genius steals”!

​@@samansun He probably lifted it from someone else, and it probably goes back 100 times before anything was recorded.

Could be true as there's no way to know now. One thing we know is that you need an electric guitar to play those licks, the first explorers of which were Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker, that narrows the possibility from100 to almost none.@@chalkandcheese1868

And the opening riff of Johnnie B. Goode is lifted from Robert Johnson's I Believe I'll Dust My Broom (1936) and Elmore James' Dust My Broom (1951).

Paul is the Bob Ross of guitar. (The beard is like his Afro)

​@@Prossdogomg you're right!

Well said Mark.
Paul would be an absolute joy too get lessons with, I mean pretty great here on KRplus but in person would be something else.

Ah Budgie, I remember them supporting Gillan who had just hired a young ex White Spirit guitarist Mr J. Gers.

I saw Budgie at the Texas theater a long time ago...I still have some vinyl somewhere in the closet... :p

The riff from Breadfan is one of my all time favourites.

​@@neilhutchison3338rhcp Around The World is a LOT like Breadfan

Zoom Club!! 🤟

Also pleased that the Damned got a mention relating to the Nirvana/Killing Joke comparison. I've always called this out on the side of The Damned. As far as I'm concerned, it's their riff. Never viewed it as filler though. I love Strawberries as an album. It's always sat in my top five favourite long players. Can't wait to see them playing Black Album and Strawberries in December with Rat back behind the drums. I'm so stoked for this gig!

@stegra5960 I was looking at a similar walk home after I missed the last train home after the gig first time I saw them in '86. But I thought "bollocks to that!" And kipped in a bus shelter outside the train station, then got the first train home in the morning!

Captain Sensible doesn’t get the credit he deserves as a sh*t hot guitarist! He absolutely kills it on “Machine Gun Etiquette”, “The Black Album” and “🍓 🍓 🍓”!

I'm also a big Damned fan, though onto other songs of theirs.... The Damned's In Dulce Decorum sounds extremely similar to the earlier Stranglers song Duchess.

Congratulations

Killing Joke was very underrated

The Damned have some seriously good stuff

Love Song, classic punk.

The damned are an incredible band, I strongly urge you to check them out if you haven't. They were hands down the best of the first wave of British punk, and they were sincere unlike the sex pistols. I've been of the mind that the sex pistols are basically just a well timed corporate plant, and I hate that they get all the attention from that scene. The clash are a good band too but I never fully got into them, I don't know why I just don't like their stuff too much. I have a lot of respect for Joe Strummer though, I just had a hard time getting into their music overall - but the damned are incredible. The black album and Machine Gun Etiquette are such fantastic albums (MGE is my personal fav but their first two albums are great too, their self titled first release is iconic AF so I am not trying to throw shade). The damned were the first actual British punk band to release music so they totally deserve all the credit everyone just hands to the pistols. (And let's be real, Johnny rotten is a horrible POS that has totally proven time and time again that he is just out here to be a contrarian that just pisses people off for attention. I like the first few records he made with Public Image Ltd but I really dislike him as a person overall)

​@@oggabobyeah they do. They're incredible. I find myself going back to them, Joy Division, The Cure, and Bauhaus the most out of all the British punk bands. Bauhaus is my personal favorite musically but I have quite an affinity for the damned, they just kick ass man.

Great point.

I heard that’s what happened with the Art of Noise cover of the Peter Gunn theme. One of the members was like “hey check out this bass riff I came up with” and the other members were like “yeah that’s the Peter Gunn theme,” and he had no clue.

There are unlimited variations for those 12 notes

@@macaretos5783 Like The Library of Babel does for words, only here it's for music.

@@alexgrunde6682That didn’t happen.

You can start very early in musical history. Let's turn to the melody.
The “Palästinalied” (Palestine Song), a crusade song written by Walther von der Vogelweide (13th century), has a melody based on a 12th century song by the troubadour Jaufre Rudel.
Johann Sebastian Bach used for his “O Haupt Voll Blut Und Wunden” the melody of an old profane song by Hans Leo Hassler.
And so on and so on.
But be careful. The group “(The) Soft Machine” took their name from the title of a novel by William S. Burroughs (1961).
Already in 1957 published the Dutch poet Leo Vroman a poem starting with the line “De mens is een zachte machine” (Man is a soft machine).
That Vroman inspired Burroughs is very unlikely. As far as I know, Burroughs couldn’t read Dutch.
So did Vroman know “a soft machine” as a standard expression ? In American English ? - I don’t know of such an expression in Dutch. Perhaps an American can enlighten me.
Be careful with A influenced B. It’s always tricky, when such influence is not confirmed - as “Soft Machine”-members always did concerning their band name.
(Listen also to “Truckin’” by “The Grateful Dead” in which the expression “soft machine” is also taken from Burroughs' text.)

Let's do it! Cursed Breakfast Cereal themed metal album. A million quatloos to the first to achieve this.

I've heard that attributed to a lot of people, sometimes as "good artists borrow, great artists steal." Regardless, it's the truth: stealers make it their own.

I thought it was Picasso who said that.

That's a false statement.
It was Picasso. And the quote is " only amateurs wait for inspiration "

@@sabbathjackal So, you're sure John Lennon never said it?

I like the Dylan lyric based on that idea, steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.

I had heard that Come As You Are was very similar to Eighties (the latter being fairly well-known and being the theme song of Fox's short-lived sitcom That Eighties Show) but I didn't know that it was similar to a song by The Damed. The Damned, of course, directly copied The Stooges song "1970" for their track "I Feel Alright," which is really just a cover with a few changed lyrics.

​@@elliottcovert3796ok but they at least credited the stooges for that song on the album it's from though

​​@@elliottcovert3796"I feel alright", was a cover of the original Stooges song with an altered title, not a rip off

*cough* Jimmy Page repeatedly ripped off Bert Jansch particularly with 'Black Mountain Side', which bears an uncanny resemblance to 'Blackwaterside' *cough*

There's a bit of Atomic by Blondie in there too.

@@pedeyw And Good Old Fashioned Loverboy by Queen too

Funny thing is Zep ripped Trampled Underfoot from the Doobies. Listen to Long Train Runnin’ then Trampled Underfoot lol

Not even close

Yep as an ode to the generation of music they loved as they saw music having a “revolution” that’s just how I took it but maybe it was just random shit mashed together between the band to make greatness like in the get back documentary 😂

Yea everyone was doing that type of riff back in those days. There’s tons of artists using that minor/ major pentatonic chuck Barry intro.

I don't think Beatles opening riffs should be considered part of the song. As a band used to playing live they just needed an instantly memorable opening so that muscle memory would kick in and they'd all come in on the beat and the song proper would begin. And btw I always thought Lennon was quoting/channeling Chuck Berry with that opening. If the song proper seemed to be copying someone else then I'd be interested - acknowledged covers aside of course.

@@MrSwanley "I don't think Beatles opening riffs should be considered part of the song." This is one of the more laughable things I've read on KRplus. Congrats.

John Lennon paid so much "homage" to Chuck Berry's music (among others) that he had to record several covers (Rock 'n' Roll) from the catalogue of the publisher who owned the music in order to settle a lawsuit against him for plagiarism. So there's that.

Iron maiden are horrible!!!!

@@Patrick-fj4vz 100 million record sales doesn't back up your claim😊😊

It is no surprise that 2 minutes to midnight is similar to White Spirits song as Janick Gers was White Spirits guitarist and the band was awesome. I like it more than Iron Maiden.

@@kkarx 2 minutes was written by Smith about 5 or 6 years before Janick joined Maiden so that isn't the reason at all

yes exactly the same.

Rory Gallagher Moonchild is totally the same lol

Reo riding the storm out

@@piggyroo100my sister always sings riding the storm out over my playing of story in your eyes 🤣

@@ethanellis9875 I like to sing Piano man over Edmund Fitzgerald

Which is also similar to the riff in I Stole Your Love by Kiss.

Yes Ritchie has stated that he took Gershwin's melody and made it into a rock riff. He's pretty much admitted to anything he stole or borrowed. Have a listen to Rock Star by Warpig, let me know which Deep Purple song it reminds you of.

Exactly!

The kids weren't ready for Marty so somebody had to do it later.

Marty literally gave Berry permission to use it

All because of his cousin Marvin.. Marvin Berry!

It's Marvin's fault. He's the one who called Chuck.

Yeah it is

True. Even Chuck Berry himself used this riff on multiple of his songs

George Harrison had a lot of money............

@@cidDraGonFly He defended himself in court but admitted it's possible he'd internalized the Shirelles melody and unknowingly wrote My Sweet Lord using it.

Actually he claimed it was the song “Oh Happy Day” that was his inspiration for “My Sweet Lord”.

What you say is just what always happened in classical music, thus the "variations" genre.

Jordan was rock and roll man. Straight ahead 4/4 no swing just stomp.

Big, BIG Louie Jordan fan. Big influence on me and my playing. Guy was just smooth.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Ive found "Rock and Roll" as a musical term in an Ella Fitzgerald song from 1937 _Rock it for Me_

I still listen to Louis Jordan all the time. IMO best music of the 20th century- or at least the most enjoyable.

Bizarre how little discussion there are about The Byrds, and specially Roger McGuinn guitar playing, considering how it is unanimously agreed that Eight Miles High was the birth of Psychedelic Rock.

*England;...

Yeah, it's basically an muted open string chug and a double stop rhythm variation.

Tbh i didnt see it anywhere in that exact form

Check out the opening riff from 'the story in your eyes' by the Moody Blues'. Predates all Paul's examples as it came out in 1971. Justin Rocks

I mean Iron Maiden self-plagiarised a lot too. They pretty much created a career out of Em-C-D. Its quite inspirational how much mileage they got out of it. I was learning Hallowed be Thy Name the other day and I was stunned that this 7 minute song has a dozen riffs in it that all pretty much use Em-C-D. There's a lesson in there for all of us!

@@fathuman in roman numerals that would be i bVI bVII as they used that chord progression in every minor key known to man.
Another prime example is Aces High and, indeed, numerous other Steve Harris-written Maiden songs.

I guess there is one advantage today, and that's the technology like KRplus which can readily identify if you're playing something that's TOO similar, like how they identify covers.
In the past, you'd have to release your music and then hope you hadn't produced a blatant rip-off that you forgot you'd listened to, a few years earlier. I realise that can still happen today, but KRplus (or similar technology) can help identify if you've been a little TOO influenced.

Of course, all art is derivative and it's very natural, but there are degrees of "inspiration" thus the video with a couple examples that are not "open to interpretation," but almost exactly the same.

@@castleanthrax1833 Personally I see this as a step backward, not forward for music. There should be unconscious borrowing in music. It is part of why music resonates and grows (people build on very similar ideas). I will be honest a lot of music today that comes out of the youtube environment feels very sterile, very much like it is emulating an aesthetic (something youtube is good for) but doesn't seem as genuine to me (I feel like everyone is hyper aware of the audience now, playing entirely to the algorithm and paralyzed by fear of accidentally borrowing something)

Exactly, well said 👍🏻

Yeah, the ridiculous idea that someone can own some series of notes because they played it "first" is preposterous. The concept of "intellectual property" as applied to music is a fairly recent invention, not that long ago everyone just sort of acknowledged that almost all music is derivative, and if you "stole" an existing riff and put a different spin on it to make a new song, it wasn't equated to a crime.

Joy Division was innovative because they were non-musicians who had no idea what they were doing. Only the drummer had formal training. Peter Hook was appointed to bass, and was confused when he went to a music store and saw it had only four strings.
Kinda have a soft spot for 80s goth culture. Formative sexual experience came from the gf of a local goth band leader's GF. Ended up stalked by goth minions over it. I was just 17, stil in HS. I was terrified. But it made big nerdy me cool all the sudden. Wildest part ever is that 20 years later I was involved with someone who was the subsequent GF of that guy.

That’s a band I can’t stand.

Yanik was not in Iron Maiden when 2 minutes was written

@@marcusadamson532i know, and that's not what i even said.

Near all Nirvana songs are rip-offs, actually, just 55 of these...

blackmore`s "beethoven" quip was clearly taking the piss out of whomever asked him about it: there`s absolutely no similarity in any way whatsoever.

@@donkeyshot8472 That's just exactly what Blackmore loved to do: taking a piss at everyone in his own sense of humour and make them wonder. For example: he had this one strap lock put right on the end of the head stock of his Fender and he just put that there for no other reason other than to make people wonder why... Absurdism is what makes Blackmore this wonderful player that he's always been and that's why I love him so much just as i like absudism in any other forms of art.

@@phillarsson8253 blackmore`s "sense of humour" would be fine if not for the fact that he clearly stole the "smoke on the water" riff from carlos lyra.
taking the piss is one thing, but purposefully hiding the truth in doing so is quite another; which perhaps also tells us a thing or two about the guy`s
character: gillan and glover could maybe tell us a story or two...

@@donkeyshot8472 Don't know what a persons type of sense of humour has to do with the fact if wether or not riff's where stolen but anyway: Blackers was never to proud to admit the riffs he found by influence from others, such as 'Black Night" which derived from Ricky Nelson's "Summertime" to name just one and you'll know the others ;-) and there's video's where Blackmore openly talks about some of those riffs. You might be a hater of the guy and true: he can be a terrible caracter but doesn't need to be told because he's the first one to admit -indeed covering it in his own sense of humour (again). The guys from LZ might seem more friendly caracters but never have I heard one of them openly admit the riffs -and sometimes even about complete songs they stole from others in which many lawsuits were involved. I'ld be happy to learn about one lawsuit against Deep Purple for 'stealing' so if you could fill me in on that?

Child in Time: Bombay - It's a Beautiful Day.
Into the Fire: 21st Century Schizo Man - King Crimson
Smoke on the water riff is basically a standard blues figure

I found it funny one day when I saw two interviews of Paul McCartney. In one he was saying how one of his riffs was a direct copy of another song but "you can't be sued just for a bass line" In the next interview he was justifying himself for suing another band for ripping off one of his baselines. They hypocracy was just so palpable.

@@KenFullman of courde, for the two I mentioned it was a more than that

weirdly when I heard 2 minutes to midnight in this video I immediately thought of Deep Purple "Burn" intro and I was surprised it was not on the infinite list of supposedly rip-off!

Haha, touche :-D Not to mention was the sole creator of metal!

👏😆Exactly!

If Marty copied Johnny B. Goode from Chuck, and Chuck copied it from Marty (over the phone, thanks to his cousin Marvin), who wrote it originally?

On a guitar that had not yet been produced at that.

Killing Joke is one of my favourite bands. Medicine wheel, Money is Not our God, Prozac People, Pandemonium , etc. etc. etc.

BTW, Satriani's Ice 9 (or smth else from Surfing w the Alien?) sounds like Love Like Blood's riff...
Jordie has a better guitar sound than Satch, well, at least since he bough his jazz guitar, but Satch has the chops

Let's kamikaze 'til we get there

@mindbomb2000 Pilgrimage and Empire Song for me. Love the guitar on Big Buzz too.

@@hydorah push, push... STRUGGLE!

Pretty sure there's an interview somewhere with either Ritchie, Ian Gillan, or Roger Glover saying that they ripped off Summertime

They all stem from Ricky Nelson, Hendrix copied it too

Or The Damned Life Goes On.

@@HenritheHorse Yep! The Damned! Check out their who;s paranoid now ?album Skip the first song and listen to a marvelous album!

Holy shit you're right

Wait what

Oh man! Thank you! A band I've never got around to listening to. Just listened to that track and the Cactus album. Awesome stuff. Cheers. 👍🏻👍🏻

Oh my .. well spotted

...whereby parchman farm itself was written by blues guitarist bukka white in 1940. it achieved fame in a piano-based version by the jazz pianist mose allison in 1957
and notoriety by the likes of blue cheer (in 1968) and then cactus...who based their own version very much on original hard rock/metal pioneers blue cheer.

I also thought the Frehley solo on Shock Me from Alive II had similar structure to Eruption

Cactus was great, I loved zoning out to them and just grooving to their music. Thanks for the memories.

Wait'll you hear Green Day's Foxboro Hot Tubs side project. Every tune is basically a famous '60s song just slightly altered and with new lyrics. It's actually impressive.

Yes the bass riff at the end of the chorus in I got a name has always reminded me of the STP guitar riff

Every time I listen to one of those I have to listen to the other. I love both.