Chords for Recreating the Sound: Ep.1 The "Ramble On" Acoustic

As a music producer, I always loved the way songs were put together, especially the sonic elements of them.
Beyond the melody and the lyrics, I love sonics.
I love sounds.
Guitar sounds, bass sounds, drum sounds.
And one sound that I've always wondered about is the acoustic guitar from Ramblin' On by Led Zeppelin.
When I did my What Makes This Song Great on it, I soloed the acoustic guitar and I thought,
man, what is that?
It doesn't sound like any acoustic guitar I have.
About a month after it came out, Jimmy Page had a picture, this picture, that was on [N] his Instagram.
He said it was from the making of Led Zeppelin II.
And I'm looking at it and I can see that he's playing in A major chord in the fifth position.
I'm thinking, that's like Ramblin' On.
So I look at the guitar and I was like, what is that?
So I take the picture and I send it to my buddy Dave Onorato.
I said, Dave, what is this guitar?
He said, oh, that's a Vox Acoustic.
In the picture, I also noticed that there's a microphone,
a particular microphone that I actually own, AKG D30.
Here's the D30 right here.
You notice it has a silver side on one side and black in the other.
OK, look closely at it.
The silver side is the one facing the guitar.
Let's look at the picture again.
If you look at the picture, you can see the outline.
It's a big, bulky microphone and that's definitely a D30.
So I asked Dave, is it possible that that's the guitar Jimmy Page is using on Ramblin' On?
He goes, oh, definitely.
That sounds like that kind of guitar.
The bolt on neck gives it a really different sound.
It doesn't sound like any acoustic guitar.
So I looked on Reverb and I found one.
Check it out. _
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[Em] _ _ _ _ _ OK, so here's the guitar.
Let me show it to you up close.
You can see on the pickguard down here, where is it?
Right here.
It says Country & Western, Vox.
It's kind of like my Country & Western Gibson that's over here.
The year of this guitar is 1969.
Basically the same year I would think that that would be,
since it's roughly around that year that they made it.
Here's the bolt on neck.
Let's take a look at it close.
You can see there it's bolted with four bolts.
When I turn it this way, you'll notice that there's a huge crack in it that just developed right here.
And you'll see where the neck hits the body there.
The bridge has this unique [C] adjustable bridge.
It's very [N] flat on the top here,
which I think gives it its sound that to me sounds like a cross between an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar.
It's obviously a big body acoustic, but it sounds kind of like an electric guitar as well.
Next we're going to go down the hall to the drum room.
I'm going to set up in front of the drum kit,
just like Jimmy Page is in front of Bonham's kit.
We're going to recreate the picture, and my assistant GL is going to get it mic'd [E] up. _ _
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_ [A] _ _ _ _ [Abm] I'm not sure what mic pre's we're using in this.
In the early Zeppelin records at Olympic Studios,
[N] it's a Helios console I believe.
I'm going to record with a BAE Neve-style mic pre's,
and we'll try and get it as close as we [B] can.
The signal flow for [Bb] the microphone out there, we have the D30 placed on the acoustic,
maybe a foot away at an angle if you saw.
[B] And then we're going through [Am] a Neve-style BAE [Gb] 1032 mic preamp.
There's no EQ on it, so we're going flat.
So there's nothing influencing it, just a little bit of gain on it.
And then we're going into [Bb] an old tube-style compressor, Universal [Cm] Audio LA [Ab]-2A.
With the amount of compression, it's not very much compression, it's probably [Bb] hitting at about minus 5 at the [E] most of Rick's heaviest strikes.
It's really catching a lot of the basic transients, but [E] that's really about it.
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_ _ _ _ _ Let me give that [N] shot a little bit more context.
I'm wearing headphones, GL is feeding me the original Ramblin' with a Count Off.
It's actually with John Bonham.
I don't know if he's playing on a drumstool or a guitar case,
but that's providing the click track in my headphones.
So I have me and Jimmy Page playing, and I'm trying to mimic the slight tempo fluctuations that he does within it.
We're going to go in the control room and A-B them and see how close it is.
Okay, I brought it into [Cm] Pro Tools.
I'm going to play you the two tracks.
They're pretty similar, but there's a little bit of work I need to do on the new track, [F] compression-wise, and on the [E] top-end EQ. _ _
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_ [A] _ _ _ [Ab] Well, one thing I can [G] hear is that his has [B] a lot more compression on it.
Not a lot, but definitely [Cm] more compression.
I'm going to bring up a plugin called Analog Channel and see if I can get it with one of the tape presets here.
If I can get it a little closer.
Let's say Euro Tape.
[Ab] Let's see what that is.
It has a little [E] bump in the low end. _ _
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_ [A] _ _ _ _ So I can hear on Jimmy's, [Cm] once again, that he has a little bit more top-end.
I'm going to actually put an EQ plugin before that.
So the plugin I'm going to use is going to be my _ FabFilter _ Pro EQ 3.
_ _ And let's see here.
Let's listen to it [E] again. _
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[E] _ [A] _ _ _ _ _ [B] That's pretty close.
I added some bottom-end and I added a little bit of [Cm] top-end.
The bottom-end is at 110, top-end is at about 12k, which is similar to what you would have a high shelf on an EQ from back then.
One thing I noticed is [E] that I wasn't playing it close enough to the bridge.
I was playing in here, [A] _ _ and I think [E] Jimmy's playing it back here. _
You can hear that pick hitting the strings [Gb] like that.
You can hear the tension of it being closer to the bridge.
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If [C] I look at the EQs between the two, I'm going to bring up this _ FabFilter.
This actually has a frequency analyzer if I use the same plugin here.
So let's go EQ, [E] FabFilter, and I can put them side by side. _
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_ [A] _ _ _ _ [E] When you compare those two EQs [A] side by side, they look almost identical.
I'd love to [Bm] know what you guys think.
Leave a comment in the comment section.
And [Cm] also let me know of other songs that you'd like to see me mimic the sound of.
It could be a snare sound, kick drum sound, a bass guitar sound, anything that you'd like to see me try and [Bb] do a recreation of.
[F] That's all for now.
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