How many songs use this riff? (Sabbath, Blondie, Maiden etc)

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quizzymodo
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29 May 2023, 11:58 am

A while back I came across a list of songs that had a similar riff or beat to The Kingsmen's Louie Louie, such as Wild Thing (The Troggs), All Day And All Of The Night (The Kinks), More Than A Feeling (Boston), Dressed For Success (Roxette), Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana), and so on.

But on this thread I want to talk about another riff (or beat). I can only think of five songs that use this riff. It feels to me like the similarities between these songs should be well known, and that there should be lots more songs out there that sound similar, but when I search online it seems that's not the case.

The earliest example of this riff I can find is Children Of The Grave by Black Sabbath (1971).
Other examples are Call Me by Blondie (1980), The Phantom Of The Opera by Iron Maiden (1980), What She Said by The Smiths (1984), and The Old Ways by Loreena McKennitt (1991). In fact, it might be a bit of a stretch to say this last song (I'm only really talking about the introduction to it) uses the same riff, but I find this last one interesting because it is more of an Irish-style folk song than a rock song.

Can anyone think of any other songs using this riff? You can check out what I'm talking about below.











naturalplastic
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29 May 2023, 6:06 pm

Led Zep did something similar in "the Immigrant Song".



quizzymodo
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30 May 2023, 12:20 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Led Zep did something similar in "the Immigrant Song".


Thanks, but I can only see vague similarities with the Immigrant Song.

I am particularly thinking about the following phrase taken from 'Children of the Grave'. Particularly the rhythm of the phrase as opposed to the particular chords (note the two crotchets at the end).

Image

Since I am focusing on a pretty short phrase, and on the rhythm as opposed to the chords, it makes me think there should be loads of songs out there that use it. But I am not very musical myself, and it could be that even my own examples are not appropriate. I think I remember coming across a reddit thread comparing 'Children of the Grave' with 'Call Me', and one person (who was clearly musically knowledgeable) said that he didn't think they were very similar at all, and that if you classed them as similar, you might as well class the Doctor Who theme as similar as well!