“To this day, I find it incredibly ironic and hilarious that it turned into a song, especially such a successful one”: How Slash’s throwaway riff became the most successful Guns N' Roses song ever

Guns N' Roses' Sweet Child O’ Mine has stood the test of time. Slash’s iconic intro riff must reverberate through every Guitar Center – and, for that matter, guitar stores around the world – at least a couple of times a day.

But what’s Slash’s secret technique to his perennial finger-twisting riff? According to the man himself, there isn't one.

“There's no secret technique,” Slash said in a 2009 interview with Guitar World’s readers. “That's just my pick-up-a-guitar and fuck-around-with-it style of playing. That whole riff was just a mistake – a joke, really.”

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Slash then revealed the riff started as “a stupid exercise” that he kept going back to nearly every time he picked up his guitar: “I don't really know how to practice properly, so I like to make up things that are difficult to play, so that I can become better at what I do.”

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By the point it actually became a song, Slash estimated that he had already “played that riff a million times” without ever thinking it would flourish into a song – let alone one of the band’s most enduring hits.

“One day, while I was playing the riff, Izzy [Stradlin, former Guns N' Roses guitarist] started playing some chords, and the thing just took off! I think that just goes to show the value of doing things on the guitar that get you out of the box.”

Recording it was another matter altogether. “That solo intro seemed impossible, even though I'd played the riff alone, without the band, for years,” he admitted. “I almost never do more than two or three takes, but that one took at least eight. It was pretty frustrating.”

However, in recent years, Slash has sought to clarify the warm-up exercise origin story.

Speaking on the Eddie Trunk Podcast in 2022, the guitarist insisted, “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.”

Irrespective of how the riff came about, Slash wasn’t even a fan of the whole song – even going as far as to tell Duff McKagan, “We’ve got to get rid of this song somehow.”

His bandmates made the right call. When it was released in June 1988, Sweet Child O’ Mine topped the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and became the band’s only number one single in the States.

As Slash himself put it, “To this day, I find it incredibly ironic and hilarious that it turned into a song, especially such a successful one.”