“Waking up the army of guitars”: Jimmy Page’s favourite Led Zeppelin guitar tone
When you listen to Led Zeppelin, you are listening to four masters at work. Some of the best minds in music come together, merging their complex understanding of melody and rhythm to create a blend of acoustic music, rock and blues, the likes of which the world had never seen. They were complete trendsetters, and Jimmy Page was in the middle of everything.
Jimmy Page was raised in a place surrounded by different guitar styles. He first started learning on an old acoustic guitar, which he swapped the strings around on so that he could bend them and play the blues. He mastered his ability while at school, and after life in a touring band didn’t work out the first time around, he opted to become a session musician.
While working as a session guitarist, Page played for various artists who explored different genres of music. This constant exposure to various sounds helped him form the idea for Led Zeppelin, a band that could explore multiple genres of music while still making something cohesive. He had time to try out these ideas in The Yardbirds and knew there was potential.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” said Page when discussing how he arrived at the band’s iconic sound. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before. Lots of light and shade in the music.”
While blending so much in one go is a tall order for any musician, the star-studded team who made up Zeppelin were up for the challenge, and it was clear from the very first moment they played together that they were on to something special. Robert Plant recalls their first jam: “It sounded good – very exciting and challenging because I could feel that something was happening to myself and everyone else in the room. It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it.”
One Led Zeppelin song where the band’s musical prowess is well and truly on display is their track ‘Black Dog’. The time signatures are haphazard, and the blend of each instrument is so experimental and chaotic that many people believed John Paul Jones initially wrote it to be a song that no other band could cover.
“I actually wrote it in rehearsal from Jimmy’s house on the train,” said Jones, dispelling the rumours, “My Dad was a musician and he showed me a way of writing down notation on anything. And so I wrote the riff to ‘Black Dog’ on the back of a train ticket, which I unfortunately don’t have.”
One sound that you should particularly note on this track is Jimmy’s guitar, not just the notes he plays but the instrument’s tone. Despite being such an experimental guitarist, this was one of his signature tones, which was challenging to handle and felt like it could explode at any moment.
You hear that in full force at the very beginning of the song as the first bit of feedback and noise is Page turning his guitar up. This was him preparing his six-string for more Led Zeppelin magic. This was a common sound that the band didn’t often leave in on recordings. It was likely kept in on ‘Black Dog’ to prepare listeners for the chaos that would ensue. The sound you hear that welcomes in the guitarist’s favourite tone is quite aptly remembered as “Waking up the army of guitars”.
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