You may have heard that the riff from the Guns N’ Roses classic “Sweet Child O’ Mine” started out as one of Slash’s warm-up exercises. It makes for a great story, but it’s NOT true. Slash says, quote,
“I was sitting around the house where Guns used to live at one point, in ’86 I guess it was, and I just came up with this riff. It was just me messing around and putting notes together like any riff you do. “You’re like, ‘This is cool,’ and then you put the third note and find a melody like that. So it was a real riff, it wasn’t a warm-up exercise.” He adds, quote, “That’s how it started, and then Izzy [Stradlin] started playing the chords behind it and then Axl [Rose] heard it and it started from there.”
REUTERS PHOTO
