The 5 Best Guitar Intros of All Time That Every Guitarist Should Know
Fair Warning: This Is Highly Subjective
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Some songs just start. And then there are songs where the first two seconds are enough for every guitarist in the room to stop talking. The best guitar intros of all time work like a great movie opening: they create tension, atmosphere, and in most cases a very specific image in your head. Fair warning: what follows is aggressively subjective. You’ve been warned.
The Best Guitar Intros of All Time
What’s fascinating about most of these legendary best guitar intros of all time is that they’re not particularly complicated to play. What makes them legendary is timing, sound, dynamics, or just a really great idea. Here are five guitar intros that wrote music history and still hit just as hard today.
The Best Guitar Intros of All Time: Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine
There’s probably no guitar intro that gets recognized faster than Slash’s opening melody. Even by people who don’t play guitar. And the thing is, the riff reportedly started as a warm-up exercise, not as a planned defining moment of rock history. Thank god nobody in the studio said “maybe leave that one out.”
What’s always struck me about this intro is how it blurs the line between melody and emotion. It works almost like a vocal line, and it creates a feeling of scale and nostalgia before the first word is even sung. The tone Slash gets is exactly what you’d expect from him: warm, singing, and just the right amount of rough. That combination made “Sweet Child O’ Mine” one of the most important rock hits of the late ’80s and cemented Slash as one of the greatest guitar players of all time.
The key gear element: the legendary Kris Derrig Les Paul copy paired with a wide-open Marshall tube amp*. That midrange-heavy, sustain-rich tone is basically the blueprint for classic hard rock guitar to this day.
The Best Guitar Intros of All Time: Metallica – Master of Puppets
Few intros have shaped an entire genre the way this one did. The moment James Hetfield unleashes those first downstrokes, everything is clear: this is thrash metal in its purest form.
What’s impressive isn’t the complexity of the notes. It’s the sheer precision of the picking hand. This riff runs entirely on tightness, rhythm, and controlled aggression. A lot of guitarists still make the mistake of thinking the sound comes from gain alone. It’s Hetfield’s right hand that makes it massive. Personally, “Master of Puppets” is still my go-to song when I want to work on speed, precision, and switching quickly between a Mesa crunch and a clean sound. An absolute masterpiece to listen to and to play.
The sound comes from a Mesa/Boogie Mark IIC+, whose aggressive mids and fast response changed the entire metal scene. Combined with active EMG pickups, the result is a guitar tone that still serves as the template for modern metal riffing.
The Best Guitar Intros of All Time: U2 – Where the Streets Have No Name
That famous delay pattern creates a hypnotic pull that makes the song feel bigger than it actually is. The Edge is probably the guitarist who has used effects more musically than anyone else. The delay here isn’t decoration. It’s the actual heart of the song.
The central gear element is the well-known dotted eighth delay, typically played through a Vox AC30*. That combination of crystal-clean tone and rhythmic repetitions has influenced more ambient, indie, and worship guitarists than almost anything else in rock history. If you want to understand how a single effect can define an entire sound, this is the intro to study.
The Best Guitar Intros of All Time: Ozzy Osbourne – Crazy Train
This intro sounds like controlled chaos to this day. Randy Rhoads, for my money the best guitarist Ozzy ever worked with, combined classical music ideas with the raw energy of early heavy metal and created something completely new in the process.
The intro to “Crazy Train” feels frantic, almost chaotic, and aggressive, yet it’s also impossibly precise. The combination of palm muting and that springy, bouncing groove is what makes the opening so iconic. And honestly: there’s no guitarist who hasn’t grinned ear to ear the first time they learned to play it. I’m confident about that one.
The tone came primarily from a white Gibson Les Paul Custom run through heavily modified Marshall amps. The result was a guitar sound that bridged classical technique and metal energy in a way nobody had done before and few have managed since.
The Best Guitar Intros of All Time: The Rolling Stones – Paint It Black
Sometimes a few seconds are enough to create an entire world and paint a complete picture. Paint a picture — get it? That’s exactly what happens with “Paint It Black”: the intro sounds dark, hypnotic, and almost menacing, setting it clearly apart from most rock classics of what was otherwise a pretty tame era.
The effect comes from rhythm, repetition, and that near-trance-like atmosphere. Keith Richards proves once again that great rock music is often less about virtuosity than about character. No shredding, no technical fireworks. Just the right idea, played with conviction.
What makes it particularly interesting is the blend of Western rock guitar and an almost Eastern-sounding mood. That exotic quality is exactly what made the song so extraordinary in the mid-1960s and went on to influence countless psychedelic, gothic, and alternative bands in the decades that followed.
The key element here isn’t a specific guitar or amp. It’s Richards’ open tuning and his rhythmic playing style. Supported by a lightly overdriven tube amp, the result is a raw, dry guitar sound that fits the song’s dark mood perfectly and remains instantly recognizable to this day.
The Best Guitar Intros of All Time: Honorable Mentions
Five spots are never enough for a list like this. A few intros that absolutely deserved a place here:
- Jimi Hendrix – Purple Haze — two notes, and everyone knows exactly what’s coming.
- AC/DC – Back in Black — possibly the greatest drum intro in rock history, followed by one of the most iconic guitar riffs ever written.
- Led Zeppelin – Whole Lotta Love — Jimmy Page’s intro riff is raw, hypnotic, and heavy in a way that still sounds modern.
- Van Halen – Eruption — technically not an intro in the traditional sense, but it redefined what the electric guitar was capable of in under two minutes.
- Iron Maiden – The Trooper
- Ozzy Osbourne – Mr. Crowley
- The Smiths – How Soon Is Now?
- Pantera – Cowboys From Hell
- Pink Floyd – Shine On You Crazy Diamond
What would make your list? Drop it in the comments.
- Slash’s Gear: The Best Guitarists of All Time
- EMG Pickups: Everything You Need to Know
- Keith Richards’ Guitars – A long way to Hackney Diamonds
- More Guitar News on Gearnews
*Originally published at Gearnews.de by Jan Rotring.
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3 responses to “The 5 Best Guitar Intros of All Time That Every Guitarist Should Know”
Definitely status quo – whatever you want should be in the intro list
Sure, “Back in Black” and “Whole Lotta Love” are great songs. But are they really so good that they need to be mentioned twice? ;-). And as for “Eruption,” you can hardly call that an intro to the song.
Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)