Chords for The Truth About the Stairway to Heaven Solo...

[G] This [F] is probably the best [D] solo ever recorded.
[G] And it's kind of weird [Db] because the tone is not amazing.
The playing is decent, but it's not phenomenal.
No, it's none of those reasons.
No, the reason is much more profound, and it's kind of [A] weird.
And it's really going to help you. _ _ _
[E] _ _ So I started [G] playing guitar in middle school.
A bunch of my friends started [Cm] together, and it was great
[A] [G] because we started exchanging pieces [Bb] of [C] info.
[Db] Chords, [Bb] songs, riffs, [G] [Gbm] licks.
And we were all into heavy metal at the time.
All of us, except for Ben.
[Cm] Ben was a true musician.
[Ebm] Ben was into guitar for [Am] the right reasons.
We were into it because, well, you know, we thought it was cool,
but we were also into it because we just thought it was cool.
And I looked up to Ben quite a bit.
We were the same age, but he had this musical maturity that we didn't have.
See, Ben did like heavy metal.
Ben is actually the guy who introduced me to Metallica.
[Bb] But Ben also listened to older stuff, classic rock.
And I would spend all my Saturday afternoons at Ben's house
just jamming together and talking about music.
He had all the cool posters.
He had the gear.
He even had a Les Paul when [A] all of us had cheap Arial Pro 2s.
It was pretty awesome.
And one of those afternoons, after a long jamming session,
it was time for me to go back home, and Ben hands me this CD.
It was Led Zeppelin IV, which was kind of different from anything else I'd listened to.
I was really into, like I said, Metallica, Maiden, Guns N' Roses, but I gave it a chance.
So that [Abm] evening, I [Am] put that Led Zeppelin [E] CD [Am] into my player.
I listened.
[Ab] It [Am] was great.
But [E] then, [Dm] on the fourth song, at [Am] 5 minutes and 55 [E] seconds,
[Am]
[Bm] I heard the [Am] solo of [Eb] Stairway to Heaven for the very first time. _ _
As soon as I heard it, I had to listen to it again.
And I rewinded that thing over and over.
The whole evening was spent listening to the solo of Stairway to Heaven.
Now, there had to be something very special about that solo for me to rewind it over and over.
And at the time, I really didn't know what it was.
See, at the time, I was 16 years old.
I had been playing for about a year, and even though I was still in the early phases,
I started getting into more technical players.
Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, you know, those virtuosos were the ones that I would listen [D] to.
Jimmy Page was [A]
[Bm] not [Am] those guys.
What he played was [Cm] fairly accessible, very pentatonic driven.
And I knew, after a few listens, that I could probably play that stuff.
So what was pushing me to listen to this solo over and over and over?
What made such an impact?
_ It wasn't the technique, like I said.
But I had to find out for myself.
So what I did is grab the tabs.
I say that like it was easy, but no.
At the time, grabbing the tabs really meant asking my guitar teacher if he could tab it out for me.
And that's what he did.
So he tabbed out the solo of Stairway to Heaven, went back home, and started learning it.
And I found that it was fairly [Bm] easy to memorize.
And the reason it was easy to memorize was because, first of all,
Jimmy Page was using a very simple scale, the [Cm] minor pentatonic scale,
which was a good thing because that, at the time, was the only scale I knew.
A fairly simple system, right?
But I also realized that the [Am] whole solo could be [C] segmented in [F] short, almost [Am] standalone sections.
[C] And that made it very [F] easy to [Ab] memorize.
That was a very big departure from the solos that I used to listen to and I wanted to learn.
You know, the solos from _ Satch's Surfing from the Alien, for example, which is a constant flow of notes.
It was really difficult to memorize.
Plus, I had no business learning that at the time.
Remember, I had only been playing for a year and a half.
Anyways, this was different.
And I realized pretty early on that that solo was not improvised.
It was planned.
Now, I learned really early on that when you work on something hard enough,
people are going to appreciate it.
If you put the work towards it, it's going to be seen and felt.
And that's the reason I had to rewind that solo so many times.
When Jimmy recorded that solo, it was really clear that there was a lot of care and intent put into that [Cm] recording.
So now that I knew [D] why that solo had such an impact on me, [Fm] I needed to understand how [C] to do [D] it.
In other words, how could I write a solo [Fm] that, one, can be broken [Cm] into smaller [D] segments?
Two, that each [Cm] phrase would be [Fm] self-contained in a very simple system [Cm] like the pentatonic scale.
And three, that each of these sections would be really easy to memorize.
[Bm] Well, the answer to that question came years after when I was recording my third album, Evolving Seeds of Glory.
Because I recorded this from [D] home, I had the option to experiment a lot with different [G] guitar sounds.
[E] And I realized that I really liked when a guitar part is [F] harmonized or doubled.
[D] And I'm not talking about [E] rhythm guitar.
I'm [D] actually talking about lead [Ab] parts.
So there's a lot of doubled, tripled, sometimes, guitars in there.
And because of that, I had to kind of simplify the original recording on the demo version of this album.
Because I knew that I was going to re-record these, double them, triple them, sometimes even quadruple them.
So it needed to be simple.
And then it dawned on me that I was actually going through the same exact process that I extracted from that early listening session of the Stairway to Heaven solo.
I had to come up with guitar lines that were [Fm] easily segmented into smaller sections.
Parts that [Gb] used a [Db] fairly simple [C] system.
[Bb] Typically, it was minor [Gb] pentatonic.
[E] And very memorable, so that I could remember what I played as I was doubling the part.
And it's kind of weird.
Any time I was able to do that, what was recorded [Em] seemed to be the only possible option to be recorded.
See, if I tried to improvise [Bm] one of these [Am] recorded parts, it just didn't [D] sound as good.
Whatever I [E] had recorded using that three-layer method just was there and seemed to be the only option because it was the best option.
That also happens with the Stairway to Heaven solo, right?
If you try to improvise [Am] over that solo, [C] you can make it [F] work, but it's not going to sound as good as the original, [Am] in my opinion.
[C] _ _ [F] _ _ _ [Am] _ _
_ _ _ Alright, so let's get practical.
[E] How does this work?
I'm going to take a very simple chord progression.
This chord progression [G] happens to [A] be in A minor pentatonic.
[C] That's great.
[E] That means that I have my [G] system, [A] the minor pentatonic.
[C] That's what I'm going to use.
Now I'm going to try to [E] create short [G] segments.
Almost [C] standalone segments.
This means that you [E] might need to [G] loop a section of that solo [C] several times to make sure that what you're [Em] recording is simple [Db] enough and that you can remember [C] what you played.
And just go through [E] that same [G] process until you have something that [A] you can repeat [C] and double or triple [E] if you want.
That's the ultimate test.
If you can do that, your solo [G] is a good one.
_ [A] _ [Cm] _ [F] _ _ [G] _ _ _
_ [C] _ _ _ [Bb] _ [E] Now that I think of it, Stairway to Heaven's solo is actually very similar [Cm] to the solo of Bohemian [Fm] Rhapsody.
Now there's a [E] difference though, because Bohemian [D] Rhapsody was [Bb] not born from playing guitar like Jimmy Page does.
It was born from_
Actually, I'll tell you all about that in this video.