“These songs are played a lot. They’re often not played well”: Top 10 riffs played in-store at Guitar Center revealed

The cliché of aspiring purchasers wandering in to a guitar store and playing Stairway To Heaven was once so well-worn that it became a joke in the 1992 film Wayne’s World. But 34 years later, has the song remained the same? Not according to a new survey by Guitar Center.

The US-based firm has published a list of their most played riffs at their stores and the Zep classic is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Number One is Metallica’s Master Of Puppets, followed by Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses and the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.

Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto explained in an interview with Rolling Stone how they calculated the stats: “We went out to our stores leadership with survey and said, ‘Write your most overplayed songs and tell us about any anecdotes, whatever you have’. It actually turned out to be a really consistent list. What you see is, across stores, across regions, people are generally playing this type of song.”

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Metallica and Nirvana both have two songs in the Top Ten – Enter Sandman for the former, and Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are for the latter. The rest of the list has a few unexpected entries, like Tool’s Schism and Slow Dancing In A Burning Room by John Mayer, as well as one relic from the good ol’ days hanging in at Number Ten: Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water.

As for the absence of Stairway, Dalporto says that many Guitar Center stores did indeed carry signs warning punters off playing it a la Wayne’s World and that he has “a lot of empathy for store employees who hear the same song played over and over, and sometimes not so greatly.”

Of the list, he says: “These songs are played a lot. They’re often not played well. So you hear the songs over and over, but when someone nails it, you can tell. And the store staff really appreciates it when someone is awesome.”

The ten most-played riffs in Guitar Center stores:

1. Metallica – Master of Puppets
2. Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine
3. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
4. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
5. John Mayer – Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
6. Metallica – Enter Sandman
7. Tool – Schism
8. Ozzy Osbourne – Crazy Train
9. Nirvana – Come As You Are
10. Deep Purple – Smoke on the Water