Truth be told, I've got a bit of a headache today, so I'm gonna keep this post fairly simple. I'll be listing some bands (and specific songs) that are good to learn as a beginner bassist/guitarist- obviously I have more experience on bass, but a lot of the skills are transferable.
This whole band, not just the song. Most of their songs are just relatively simple riffs, which can be good for the really early stuff- learning what parts of the guitar make what noises, and feeling where the frets are relative to each other. That said, they also have some good guitar solos and bass fills, so intermediate players can still learn from them. Specifically, I would recommend Snowblind, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and basically anything off the first 3 albums.
Everyone and their dog can play Smoke on the Water (in fact, I think I heard somewhere that that song set the record for most people playing the same riff together- don't quote me on that though). I would also recommend Space Truckin'- it's another fun, recognisable riff, and although the song does get a bit more complicated later on, it's not too crazy. I will say, there are some bass fills in it that I personally have struggled with, but firstly, it's easy to just fake your way through them, and secondly, I've never properly sat down and tried to learn them (the guitarist who knew the song stopped showing up to the club a while back).
This is specifically for guitarists, because truth be told I've only ever learned one of their songs on bass, and I never ended up performing it. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I'm just not an ACDC fan. That said, they've got a large selection of very well-known riffs of varying complexity- just search "ACDC" on YouTube and a bunch of them will come up.
Honestly, I don't know as many Zeppelin songs as I should on bass. Some of the ones I do know, which are fun to play- Heartbreaker, Living Loving Maid, Whole Lotta Love, The Ocean, and Rock and Roll. Pretty much any of their early bluesy stuff is probably pretty easy to learn though, and honestly I think there is a shortage of blues-based music nowadays (I'll probably do a post about this some time). Zeppelin and Sabbath are actually pretty similar, from a bassist's point of view, in that they're generally slow, heavy riff music.
As a bassist, this really isn't my area of expertise, but there's one thing I haven't covered yet. Milder classic rock songs- the ones that are largely just chords played on an acoustic guitar. Zeppelin has a few good songs of this type, as do a lot of bands I can't seem to think of at the moment. One of my favourites might be David Bowie/My Death- there's a video of him performing the song on YouTube, which I would definitely recommend you watch. I think part of what I like is how it switches back and forth from major to minor throughout the song- which, come to think of it, probably helps with learning chords.
As boring as it sounds, learning scales is a very important part of learning an instrument. When the rock and roll club does jam sessions, we usually start by saying "what key?". If you don't know keys and scales, it can definitely make it harder to join in- though if you have a good ear, you can pick out the notes the other people are playing and go from there. That aside, scales are a good way to learn the usual coordination stuff, though as I've said, there are more fun ways to do this if that's your only goal.
Anyways, hopefully you found some of these ideas useful! If you have any other recommendations for bands/songs, feel free to leave them in the replies
