3 Songs To Learn if You Want To Start a Hard Rock Band

If you want to start a hard rock band, you can do worse than learning these three classics. Admittedly, it’s an impossible task to narrow the options to only three tunes. But if you absorb the lessons here, you’ll be well on your way to unlocking the horn-throwing mysteries of hard rock.

So go start a band. Find a drummer and be nice to the drummer because they aren’t easy to find. You’ll also need one, perhaps two, guitarists, a bass player, and a singer. And dear singer, would it hurt you to carry an amp or at least the merch bin into the venue? Rock on, kids!

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses

You could double this list, at least, with the entirety of Appetite For Destruction. But if you are honing your rock and roll skills, you can learn quite a few lessons from “Sweet Child O’ Mine”. First, it’s a power ballad, and this is important if you want to fill stadiums. Second, there’s Slash, who powers GN’R’s hit with echoes of Jimi Hendrix and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though the track begins tenderly, it soon erupts into such a deep blues-rock groove that even Axl Rose had to ask, “Where do we go now?”

“Back In Black” by AC/DC

For hard rockers, you don’t want to lead with the ballad. You need a banger, and you can’t have a rocking banger unless you write a great guitar riff. “Back In Black” features one of the most recognizable riffs this side of “Iron Man”, but it’s also a lesson in simplicity. Listen to all the space in the track. Few drum fills because the drummer, Phil Rudd, opts for a tight groove. Travel back along rock music’s history, and you’ll pass dance music—R&B, soul, etc. Yes, you can bang your head to this tune, but you can also dance to it.

“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin

The opening track on Led Zeppelin’s third LP is relatively short. However, in less than three minutes, you can hear the songs of the rural Delta getting plugged in via Chicago before being transported from London back to the United States by Jimmy Page and others. Here, John Bonham propels his band with a thunderous groove while John Paul Jones doubles Page in a galloping riff. Finally, Robert Plant howls the blues, not in a pact with the devil at the crossroads, but with the warring Vikings of Norse mythology.

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