The secret behind Jimmy Page’s guitar sound in Led Zeppelin
One of the most important aspects behind any good guitar player is the attention to the guitar tone. For all of the fretboard masters that like to claim that the power is all in the fingers, there’s a certain talent that comes from being able to identify someone’s playing from the moment their guitar comes screeching into the mix on any song. Although some may find their signature sound by hours at their amplifier twiddling one knob after another, Jimmy Page found his sound through raw experimentation.
From his humble beginnings in The Yardbirds, Page was already looking to innovate beyond the standard fly-by-night guitar player position, employing different fuzzboxes into his sound on songs like ‘Heart Full of Soul’. After Eric Clapton left the fold to move on to a solo career, Page learned even more from replacement Jeff Beck, often playing bass half the time while watching Beck weave notes in and out of each other.
By the time Page found it time to fly solo with Led Zeppelin, he had already started accumulating his lick library, ready to spread his wings with songs like ‘Communication Breakdown’ off their first record. For all of the amazing tones that came out of the group’s first five albums, Page is quick to say that it wasn’t all about tone for him.
In Led Zeppelin FAQ, Page was quoted as saying that he had a fairly rudimentary setup through most of the group’s glory years, recalling: “All I had to work with was an overdrive pedal, a wah-wah, an Echoplex, and what was on my guitar. It wasn’t a lot, and I had to create the entire range of sounds found on the first five Zeppelin albums”.
So with the basic building blocks of any guitar player, how did Page figure out ways to warp the guitar in a way no one had ever seen before? Where most people would have seen the lack of effects pedals getting in the way, Page took a different approach by using what he had in his unique way.
For a song like ‘Black Dog’, the distinctive sound of his guitar coming in the first verses comes from him plugging his guitar directly into the console to get his sound. Since there was no reverb pedal for Page to work with, ‘Whole Lotta Love’ featured natural reverb from Page intentionally bending one of the strings slightly out of tune so it would echo off the open string.
Page also found different ways to warp his tone as he worked with acoustic instruments. On a track like ‘Ramble On’, he made sure that he strummed the guitar closer to the bridge, giving it a sharper attack when the microphones picked it up. That’s before he got into his antics beyond the mixing board, including the massive tapestry of noise that went into the breakdown section for ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
That innovation would lead to Page making even stranger leaps on songs like ‘Ten Years Gone’, where he layered multiple guitar parts with varying tones on top of each other. Even though Page didn’t have the best gear to work with during the early days, having the cutting-edge stuff might have hurt some of Zeppelin’s classic tracks. In a world where everyone was concerned with having the best guitar tone known to man, Page proved that creativity can rise to the surface when a musician’s resources are limited.
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