The 25 Greatest Riffs of the 2010s Decade!

Not all great riffs have to be rocking or heavy. Great list and great job @ccroyalsenders!
Everyone has different likes, dislikes and favorite styles and riffs. I'd say if you don't like the list Cooper posted, feel free to post up a video of you playing yours.

Fwiw, Paul Sidoti, guitarist for Taylor uses Fractal gear all the time. He's from Cleveland and comes home often and plays with a local cover band. Played a show with him last year and we both used AX-8s.
 
Just about anybody on YouTube with a following playing guitar that uploads at a regular rate really.

Sure, Taylor Swift has reach and her songs are widely known and celebrated. Can't think of too many folks, besides you, who equate her, her music, and her live show with keeping the guitar in the youth public consciousness at large. My wife and my kids (18, 6, and 2) all listen to and love Taylor Swift. None of them could identify a Taylor Swift guitar riff. I'd argue that's the case with a good chunk of her fans as it really isnt guitar driven/centered music.

My comment was pretty tongue-in-cheek as I don't have a problem with Taylor Swift. But yeah, if her music is whats passing for "iconic" guitar parts then I will stand by my comment of it being a slow decade for iconic guitar parts. It's all subject to taste anyway. What makes a guitar part iconic is going to vary from person to person. Who knows, maybe in 40 years Taylor Swifts riffs will be the next Smoke On The Water. I won't hold my breath ;)
I read an article a few months back. According to a bunch of major music industry insiders and experts, Taylor Swift is the current generation's equivalent of Eddie Van Halen as far as generating interest in guitar and inspiring kids to start playing...
 
I read an article a few months back. According to a bunch of major music industry insiders and experts, Taylor Swift is the current generation's equivalent of Eddie Van Halen as far as generating interest in guitar and inspiring kids to start playing...

Yep. Again...
Show me an artist who did more to keep guitar in the youth public consciousness at large, the Top 40, and the band for a stadium touring act, and I'll agree.

Here's the article: https://www.guitarworld.com/artists/taylor-swift-new-eddie-van-halen

"In 2006...we started asking the students, and eight out of 10 of the students attributed Taylor Swift to the reason why they’re playing the music,” Phillip says. “Really, she’s doing the same thing Eddie Van Halen did in the early Eighties—she’s causing all the young players to want to take up an instrument and play.”
 
I must be old because I've never heard of any of the songs on this list.

Same here.

I am old and I clearly have very different tastes than the person who made this video.
No problem, to each his own. He did a nice job with the video and playing.

I would have at the very least had riffs by Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Jeff Beck, Eric Gales, David Gilmour, King Crimson, and Adrian Belew. All of which recorded great CDs and riffs in the last 10 years. Those are a few that immediately popped into my mind.
 
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Same here.

I am old and I clearly have very different tastes than the person who made this video.
No problem, to each his own. He did a nice job with the video and playing.

I would have at the very least had riffs by Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Eric Gales, David Gilmour, King Crimson, and Adrian Belew. All of which recorded great CDs and riffs in the last 10 years. Those are a few that immediately popped into my mind.

I think just we have different criteria for a list of "iconic riffs," not different tastes.
EJ, Gilmour, and Gales are literally three of my top ten all time favorite guitarists. But this isn't a list of my personal favorite riffs of decade.
If it were, it'd probably be 50% Dream Theater, 25% guys we here all worship, like EJ, and 25% guitarists so obscure they make Eric Johnson look like Slash 😂😅😉

I was aiming for a mix of the increasingly rare great riff that made its way into enormous chart hits, riffs that pushed the instrument into new directions, and a few other criteria like just how awesome I thought a few were (see #1) 😊
 
I read an article a few months back. According to a bunch of major music industry insiders and experts, Taylor Swift is the current generation's equivalent of Eddie Van Halen as far as generating interest in guitar and inspiring kids to start playing...

Ouch! Putting Taylor Swift in the same sentence with Eddie Van Halen is a blasphemous undertaking. This underscores my assessment that that the bar for grading musical value has been put into the basement… OK… to each his own.

Sorry Eddie that your achievement has been so massively degraded!
 
I read an article a few months back. According to a bunch of major music industry insiders and experts, Taylor Swift is the current generation's equivalent of Eddie Van Halen as far as generating interest in guitar and inspiring kids to start playing...

Not sure I would call Mr. Know Your Gear and a major music industry insider or expert lol, but fair enough.
 
I'll go in the other direction and say this list misses more mainstream pop - Where is Ed Sheeran? Nobody has had that many streams featuring guitar as the main instrument in the last decade. I was also looking for John Mayer, but I must admit that he has released surprisingly little music in the 10ths, and the iconic riffs, I was about to suggest were from the 0s (or even the 90s). I would also have made an effort to find a piece by Mateo Asato. It seem to me that he has really set the direction for the current state of guitar - I agree, not much of his stuff has really made its way to the charts.

EDIT: Personally, I would also have loved to see Anastasia by Slash in there - It is probably my #1 opening of the decade
 
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Ouch! Putting Taylor Swift in the same sentence with Eddie Van Halen is a blasphemous undertaking. This underscores my assessment that that the bar for grading musical value has been put into the basement… OK… to each his own.

Sorry Eddie that your achievement has been so massively degraded!
You are missing the point entirely.

It's not about technical capability but rather inspiring the youth of today.

As a fan of guitar I am happy that anyone brings fresh enthusiasm for the instrument.
 
The Know Your Gear video was NOT equating Taylor Swift's playing technique or style to EVH at all... only that she is inspiring people (especially women) to take up the instrument and play. He called her a musician, not a guitar god. And she is absolutely a talented musician. My 2 cents.
 
Here's the article: https://www.guitarworld.com/artists/taylor-swift-new-eddie-van-halen

"In 2006...we started asking the students, and eight out of 10 of the students attributed Taylor Swift to the reason why they’re playing the music,” Phillip says. “Really, she’s doing the same thing Eddie Van Halen did in the early Eighties—she’s causing all the young players to want to take up an instrument and play.”
I was having issues getting to the link earlier.

Now I was able to get there and that is only part of the full article I read (I think, maybe was a different one) because the one I read was about "the state of guitar" or something like that. It had many different references, not just one person.
 
Agree with the direction of the conversation about modern music that is still inspiring people to get into guitar one way or the other is better than nothing. The problem is instead what new generations of musicians are being inspired and incentive to produce.

Looking back at it, the most popular songs over the past decade that involve some degree of discernible guitar tracks come from Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5, Bruno Mars (just a little), Imagine Dragons, Panic at the Disco, Fallout Boy, and Twenty One Pilots. Outside of the top of the abundantly clear mainstream stuff, but still well known across much of the mainstream modern rock community, we have Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, and Muse still making a handful of entries on Billboard's the top rock songs of the decade. Also, I am not a big country music fan despite being born and raised in Texas. Although there is still more notable guitar centric music in that genre these days, it is not immune to similar downfalls that we have been seeing in rock music.

I agree with all of our underlying sentiments that the quality of guitar-centric music, and rock music in general, has generally gone downhill over the past two decades, and where we are sitting today is a troubling as we look at what lies ahead. The concern is, as music has generally gotten more and more simplified, and more interesting and complex instrument play and musician talent has gone down hill, the subsequent generation of artists have continuously perpetuated the trend further and further in the wrong direction. I am afraid that hitting rock bottom and getting to a point where there is no more room for it to get any worse it is not too far off in distance given the momentum.

It is not just the fault of the musicians either. The bigger part of the issue is with the listeners first and foremost and secondly with the record labels and music industry in general. Simply put, the overwhelming majority of listeners these days are just more interested in too many other things other than more complex, instrument centric music. This is even more true with the younger generations, which is critical since some studies have shown that the majority of people stop exploring new music after the age of 30.

Maybe if all of us older generations would actually still consume and demand better new music (weird for me to say since I am only 35), then there could be more hope for a reversal of the trend. However, there are a number of examples of great stuff from the modern era that has still not achieved much mainstream success from bands such as Rival Sons and Greta Van Fleet. These bands should even tickle the fancy of the older generations of listeners who say that rock and roll is dead. My father in law, who is a die hard Led Zeppelin fan, really liked Greta Van Fleet after I introduced him to them (as he should since they sound like a rip off of Zeppelin, but in a good way), but to no surprise he does not listen to them on his own and was not interested in seeing them in concert with me. The problem is great bands that put out higher quality stuff these days that more demanding listeners like us should enjoy just don't get the attention and support they once did and this has been slowly killing the incentive and interest for younger musicians to keep things where we wish they would have stayed.

Getting off my soapbox now. Sorry for the length. Got a little carried away.
 
Maybe if all of us older generations would actually still consume and demand better new music (weird for me to say since I am only 35), then there could be more hope for a reversal of the trend. However, there are a number of examples of great stuff from the modern era that has still not achieved much mainstream success from bands such as Rival Sons and Greta Van Fleet. These bands should even tickle the fancy of the older generations of listeners who say that rock and roll is dead. My father in law, who is a die hard Led Zeppelin fan, really liked Greta Van Fleet after I introduced him to them (as he should since they sound like a rip off of Zeppelin, but in a good way), but to no surprise he does not listen to them on his own and was not interested in seeing them in concert with me. The problem is great bands that put out higher quality stuff these days that more demanding listeners like us should enjoy just don't get the attention and support they once did and this has been slowly killing the incentive and interest for younger musicians to keep things where we wish they would have stayed.

This is a good point. My band plays GVF because we want to play some newer music for the crowd, but given the choice I still stream Zeppelin over GVF. Maybe that can be a 2020 resolution for me... go for more of a 50/50 split between the music of my youth and supporting the newer bands playing real rock. (For me, none of this takes away from the earlier point of Taylor Swift being a talented musician, btw.)
 
Some of the Ghost riffs should have been in there, somewhere.

Someone else mentioned The Black Keys.
 
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