Db major · Camelot 3B · 123 BPM
Sweet Child o' Mine
by Guns N' Roses
- 123
- BPM
- Db major
- Key
- 3B
- Camelot
- 45
- Danceability
- 10
- Acousticness
The music video passed 1.7 billion views on YouTube as of June 2025, more than three decades after Guns N' Roses released "Sweet Child o' Mine" on their 1987 debut album, Appetite for Destruction. The song had already topped the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1988, giving the band their only American number-one single, and reached number six in the United Kingdom the following year after a remixed re-release.
The track began as a warm-up exercise. Slash was playing a "circus" melody while making faces at drummer Steven Adler during a jam session at the band's house on the Sunset Strip. Izzy Stradlin asked him to play it again, then added chords, while Duff McKagan built a bassline and Adler planned a beat. Axl Rose, listening upstairs, was inspired to write lyrics that he finished by the following afternoon, basing them on his girlfriend Erin Everly.
The video, filmed in 1987, showed the band rehearsing at Mendiola's Ballroom in Huntington Park, California, with each member's girlfriend appearing on screen, along with Stradlin's dog. Its success on MTV pushed the song toward mainstream audiences, though the band objected to the radio edit, which trimmed the track from 5:56 to 4:58 and cut much of Slash's solo. Rose complained about the shortened version in a 1989 Rolling Stone interview, calling it his favorite part of the song.
Sweet Child o' Mine runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in Db major, Camelot 3B, which shares its notes with Bb minor and mixes cleanly with F# major and Ab major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.