The Led Zeppelin Riff Nobody Can Play Correctly 

😂

And his live version of stairway to heaven’s solo is the proggest solo of all time

Nah. He's pretty sloppy.

@@bingobango4840 r/woosh

He's sloppy live

True muhahahaha

It's more like perfection isn't rigid and mathematical, it is an emotive symbiosis of all the moving parts.

It's also why even many non musicians can hear the unnatural feeling of digital double-tracking. Even THE most talented musicians are incapable of playing the same exact way every single time. When you do a true double-track there will inherently be differences in how every note is played making it sound natural. It's also why you can't fake an orchestral sound by just digitally multiplying tracks of the same take, because you can't fake the fact that humans aren't perfect lol.

Perfection sounds lame. Gimme the feels!

Never liked Page as a guitar player.

How far back though? Like a micro nano milli second?

Excellent point . I agree.

@@watamatafoyu About two or three tenths of a second.

One e and a

or then again, maybe he was just drunk... 👍🏻😂

A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to

Yeah

so you telling me i'm just a misunderstood genius?

I wish....

@@alonewanderer4697 everyone has that in them. It only until they are aware of theory or understand how it works that they see they have a happy accident or brilliant madness to show

Tyler still didnt get it right. I could show him easily. when jimmy drops to the lower key he is not playing on a down beat till he hits the 5th note in the line. then the count starts, or measure if you will. i mean you can feel the implied offbeats in the line, like hes making us guess where the downbeat actually is. artistry

And it just gets worse! It really hits you when your rock heroes are dying of old age, not overdoses and suicide! 🙄

Those guys have actually been at it along time

@@jjohnson8977 that’s the point.

@@mburtondavis stay in control my friend

Seriously the definition of "Classic Rock" is gettin' so loose and sloppy, cripes you got bands from the 90's onward that are startin' to creep into this category, I guess it's like every thing else, just tryin' to change with the times, F--- THE TIMES, seriously people are just tryin' to change Classic Rock so it fits the times, the true definition of Classic Rock was the stuff from the Late 60's to the real early 80's ('67-'81) basically.

They were Everything indeed! Fusion Page's solo in No Quarter is Jazz...

Led Zeppelin, body of work will never be duplicated or surpassed..I became a fan of Led Zepplin in 1970’s when I heard physical graffiti vinyl…. I waited for a band to pass at LZ Van Halen, 80s Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, & others..haven’t found a band yet that pass LZ body of work

Agreed 100%. When I was growing up in the 70's, people assumed that because I liked led zeppelin that I must also like pink floyd and aerosmith and all the rest of it. But I always ONLY liked Zeppelin. To this day, Spotify and RU-vid will try to get me to listen to classic rock because I watch a Zeppelin video. I don't like "classic rock", just Zeppelin.

Reggie? Is that Reginald Perrin or Reginald Molehusband, the safest parker in town?

Unfortunately they also like to simply take other peoples songs and give themselves (Page & Plant) songwriter credits. They would be sued out of business today if they tried that stuff.

Eu adoro. O LED

THAT was the whole IDEA!

@@ciceroromao2643 WTF now?

I feel exactly the same. I love everything about the song, but that one part is hard to get around.

I never really liked that song, it was overplayed to death and back on the radio, though I loved some riffs, and yah I noticed it felt off, but Jimmy did that sometimes. But the drummer...

Amen

I agree

Absolutely! 🍻

ZEP were very EXPERIMENTAL, and everyone forgets that.

100pct

Agreed, and I always thought of them as "world" music. Meaning their use of Egyptian orchestra and Celtic folk.

@@MusicMotivator the best music out there makes good use of Celtic folk music in some capacity. What song used Egyptian orchestra though?

They are all that, and also, they were a pop band. Page spent the mid-1960s playing pop music sessions. He had an ear for concise hooks that you don't always find in something like a King Crimson album. A song like "Your Time Is Gonna Come" is as sweet, melodically speaking, as The Beach Boys. It was that mix of heavy guitar orchestration, nasty blues lead playing, and catchy songwriting that got the band across to guys, gals, Americans, Europeans, kids in the 1970s, kids in the 2020s...Steely Dan did much the same kind of thing at the same time, though instead of prog/blues rock + pop, they were bringing together hard-bop/post-bop harmony with pure pop songwriting and production.

I agree. When you think about it, I don’t think you can really say they weren’t progressive.

That's the problem, finding a talented drummer... At least in my experience.

Listen closely...ya know that off riff you heard, it's really just syncopation...like a lot of Bonham's drumming...it comes back to the same tempo I always wondered that in high school.. I tried to keep up with him on the dashboard of my car...a yr. Later I started taking guitar lesson...now 30+ yrs later..I've learned a lot..just an intermediate at that...prog prauge...wtf..their music is classic. Everything...

Do I need feb be t

Perfectly imperfect - I cant think of a better way to describe this! Page has given me fits since I first noticed as a wee lad and as I have gotten older I have gone from the "meh he is just sloppy" attitude to "This man is a musical genius that has a thought process I can not begin to comprehend". I find learning to play just about anything that Page came up with is never easy or predictable; I have certain phrases and patterns ingrained in me and I expect things to go a certain way but he rarely does that. And its glorious! This is a fantastic video on top of an already fantastic channel. My people!!!

Metronome is not your friend here....it's not a secret that Page have a thing for oriental music. These kind of rhytmics are all over oriental music....and even better...

Yep, a lot of rock from the '60s and '70s sounded sloppy af compared to '80s onward. That was part of its soul. Except for The Beatles... they were just crafted af

Yeah Jimi Hendrix constantly speeds up and slows down

Educate me on what great rock music is out today. I miss something.

Glad I’m not the only one that noticed

yeah. that struck me as an odd choice as well. All this talk about timing and the notes are wrong. maybe to avoid a copyright strike?

Was hoping someone in the comments noticed this as well, kind of hilarious to me that this video about nobody being able to get this riff quite right features a performance of the riff that isn't quite right. xD

Pwned

You are right sir......not sure how old you are but if you have been listening to a song for 50 years like I have it tends to be ingrained into your musical ears :)

Correct.

Yes, hit the A chord, then hit the G bending up the double A with a natural chorus effect. The slight out of tuneness is also what makes the unison D note in the Whole Lotta Love riff work so well.

And also (just me?) I think the riff has more a 5-6-7 instead of the 7-7-7 (on the 5th string before the riff resumes its usual pattern) that I seem to hear towards the end... no?

@@MarcAbela You’re mostly correct. If you listen closely, he hits the 7 on the low E, then 5,6,7 on the a, and then 5,7 on the a again before resuming the normal riff.

Hell yeah live pagey move

True but it's his take of TomCat from Muddy Waters Electric Mud album

More to the point JPJ showed Jimmy how to play it and JP couldn't play it like that, so he kinda played it in his own style. These are JPJ words in an interview I read in the early 90's. Just my two cents.

@@pepppery I heard Jones wrote it without an instrument on a train journey, notating it on a scrap of paper.

@@henryb160 Great info Henry, thanks! The more you know...

I thought that too. Always seemed to me that it was the drumming from a different track.

It's clearly a little mistake left there. This was most likely the best take, and a small imperfection wasn't enough to make it bad. Bonzo slowed down a bit for a moment (or did Page speed up?) so the rest sounds o bit off for a second, but it still sounds great, so who cares? We all love this song despite the mistake

sorry, mistaken are all the rest of the world that didn´t do like them

I agree. If I recall there is a mess up in the beat late in the song, but I don’t care. That’s Rock and Roll! 👍🏻

Being strung out, spiraling out of control, falling off stage, these are the traits of most great rock stars at one time or another. Most people get it together again. Some don't and some die. Sad to see on full display but almost a necessary journey it seems. If a rock star has never been strung out on deaths door living waaaaaay too fast, well are they really a true rock star lol... besides Gene Simmons and Ted Nugent of course.

@@redhathacker Ha! "Besides Gene Simmons and Ted Nugent of course" That funny! As a guitarist, Jeff Beck is one I can think of who might have gone through "a stage" but I don't think so, one of the few real guitar rock stars who started on top with "Truth" and stayed getting better every album. I am sure there are others but he comes to mind first for me. Thanks or the response.

I feel you. I find some of his performances really sad. When he was *on* though, he was untouchable. LA Forum 1972 or 1975, one of the 1975 Earls Court shows, No Quarter and Since I've Been Loving You off TSRTS.

@@stevebuffington6534 Yeah, Beck had a pretty solid career.

Hi, thanks for sharing your recollections! Was that the Seattle concert in 1977 you saw? That show was a low point indeed, and sadly the only one of the 1977 tour that is documented on professional video. The Seattle shows in 1975 were actually really good, judging by the bootlegs, especially the second one. And do you happen to remember in which year the LA Forum show you mentioned took place? Just curious from a "historian's perspective"....

I read an interview with Robert Plant some time ago and he said the time signatures/beats on 'Black Dog' were done deliberately to stop people from covering the song. Obviously, that didn't work. 😀

@@joolz666 no way!? Haha that's so rad

@@joolz666 But if true, why not do it to other big hits? I always felt that it sounded as it sounded because they were in that grove and it just sounded good, tight, so they left it as is on the record.

john Bonham was exceptionally good at how pushing and pulling can work on a groove, specifically when the levee breaks and kashmir, he's flirting with dragging in the first and on kashmir he's dragging the shit out of the verses but is right back on in the slot on the chorus

Yes

Superunknown probably has more alternate tunings than any Led Zeppelin album.

Spot on! That's the problem with trying to pigeon-hole bands into genres. Just saw Martin Barre, former guitarist of Jethro Tull, in concert doing the whole Aqualung album. How Tull went from hard rock like that to the English-Folk music of Songs From The Wood shows how you don't have to be one or the other. In It Might Get Loud, Page explains how he turned a classical riff and basically played it backwards to create the great Kashmir!

@@gregmiller7123 Being in a genre isn't being pigeon holed. The Beatles are still a rock band no matter how many revolution 9's and when I'm 64's they put out.

@@redrick8900 My point was that labeling a group a certain type of genre automatically causes some people to tune out. And saying the Beatles were a rock band just means that their music fell into about any of the about 500 sub-genres of rock. I'm 64, my dad knew the Beatles were going to cause the world to end and now I hear them in the elevator. From metal to prog to alt to pop, when you put those words in front of rock there will be those that will punch out. Thanks for your input!

@@gregmiller7123 I don't care what idiots do.

Fortunately nowadays we know much better

So fire

The part of the riff played in this video is all 4/4. My bars are half as long as the 4/4 bars shown with the note values doubled; I use 8th notes where the video shows 16ths and 1/4s where it shows 8ths. The tricky bit is the one bar of 9/8 where this stops, just before the "Oh yeah." The tab in the video has it all wrong from the second note, which is the first note of the bar. The time signature changes are not required and all the bar lines are in the wrong places. In "bars" 10 and 11 there should be ten consecutive 16th notes but there are only nine, and the 5,6,7,7 on the fifth string across the bar line should be 5,6,7,5,7. In the video it is played as 5,6,7,7,7. The repeated figure starting on the sixth string in bar 9 is nine 8th notes long so its position relative to the beat is different each time it's played. This contributes to the out of time feel, with the top note first a quarter ahead of the snare, then an 8th, and on the same beat the third time, but good drumming enhances the rhythmic oddity. Lining the music up on a grid is autotune for timing and has the same sort of effect on expression, though without the dire effect on the tonal quality of voices.

JPJ has said the whole point of the riffs in the song were written to not make sense and the beat not be easily/quickly followed...they were comfortably on top of their game and the music world so they said "fuck it" lets show a sense of humor and at the same time create some deceptively heavy/badass riffs....

The fortnite guy was in Led Zeppelin???

Didn't JPJ write the Black Dog lyric? Pretty sure the whole weird time signature thing was his idea. He wanted a looping riff that was off time but came back into time at the end. I think.

this is exactly the way I feel it. the phrase is displaced by an extra 1/16th note each time through of the 4xs. this is done in jazz all the time where a riff is placed on different beats.the reason most people can't feel it this way is that their underlying sense of time isn't strong enough ... so for instance they would have trouble counting through a Buddy Rich drum solo. it's a shame because when this is the case so many miss out on the cool ways phrases can feel utterly different over steady batches of 1/8ths or in the case of Black Dog 1/16ths

@@LosNoviembres The verse part in "Puttin' On the Ritz" is an example of what you're saying...

@@mikeriesco6174 and the repeated phrase in "Fascinating Rhythm" or Steve Vai's Attitude Song.

The part of the riff played in this video is all 4/4. My bars are half as long as the 4/4 bars shown with the note values doubled; I use 8th notes where the video shows 16ths and quarters where it shows 8ths. The tricky bit is the one bar of 9/8 where this stops, just before the "Oh yeah." The tab in the video has it all wrong from the second note, which is the first note of the bar. The time signature changes are not required and all the bar lines are in the wrong places. In "bars" 10 and 11 there should be ten consecutive 16th notes but there are only nine, and the 5,6,7,7 on the fifth string across the bar line should be 5,6,7,5,7. In the video it is played as 5,6,7,7,7. The repeated figure starting on the sixth string in bar 9 is nine 8th notes long so its position relative to the beat is different each time it's played. This contributes to the out of time feel, with the top note first a quarter ahead of the snare, then an 8th, and on the same beat the third time, but good drumming enhances the rhythmic oddity. Lining the music up on a grid is autotune for timing and has the same sort of effect on expression, though without the dire effect on the tonal quality of voices.

Yeah, he missed the dissonant D push in Four Sticks as well, which means he is playing Whole Lotta Love incorrectly too.

I noticed that too, missing the d note before going back to the main riff (black dog) Fairly obvious I would’ve thought

Also the tuning on Friends isn't CGCGCE. It's CACGCE

So true- The Song Remains the Same is another perfect example which sets up the RAIN SONG...

Since ive been lovong you os a progressive blues definetely. Perfect example is version From a HTWWW. If we compare a hard rock from 70 to zepps we see that Zeps define it in first to albums and after that they do much more. Maybe Presence is a most guitar zep hard rock album after Led Zeppelin 2

People forget that songwriting plays a special role in defining prog rock. You have first very ambitious songwriting, songs that tackle in different sections. Not really much into solos but rather full sections and passages, a very precious kind of sound in the approach... Obviously is not that simple, but there's very few songs of led zeppelin that actually count as prog, like Stairway to heaven and Kashmir, for example. They got the ambitious songwriting, different sections, a solo that doesn't really works as a solo but as a passage to the other sections in one song, odd time signatures in the other... Four sticks only had the odd time signatures part, which is not enough to be considered prog

If we only assigned odd signatures as the one and only characteristic of prog, then a lot of bands would be considered prog and the term would lost sense

@@joaquinlezcano2372 - Four Sticks had odd time, synths simulating an orchestral feel, a bluesy lyric, layers of acoustic and electric guitars, and finishes off with Plant doing a vocal solo - in a 24-note (quarter-tone) scale!! Brother, if that's not mufuggin' PROG, then what the hell IS??!!

Yup. Nothing better than playing live with the band...

If this helps... I think of it as a 7-note pattern (played over a standard 4/4 drum groove), that repeats 4 times -- and on the 4th repeat it morphs back up into the main riff. SO -- the thing to get right is which of the "7 notes" in the pattern syncs up with the drum's downbeat, and thus should be "accented" in your mind. On repeat #1, it's note 4 of the pattern. On repeat #2, it's note 3 of the pattern. On repeat #3 it's note 2 of the pattern. And on last repeat it's note 1 of the pattern. If you concentrate on matching (and accenting) those particular notes with the drum's downbeat on each repeat, it all works...

💯

There's other guy, some old long hair fella that nails even Heartbreaker solo... Search for "Composser analyses Led Zeppelin" or something like that

Rick Beato made a mess of Black Dog in his Top 10 Led Zeppelin Riffs and it's wrong in this video too. All the bar lines in the tab are in the wrong places and the time signature should be 4/4 throughout with one bar of 9/8 at the end. The 6,7,7 At the beginning of bar 11 should be 6,7,5,7. In this video it is played as 6,7,7,7 and Beato adds an extra note, playing 6,7, 7 (on 6th string), 5, 7.

@@nightjaronthegate post up your video of you doing it.

@@sledsports There is another error but not in the guitar. In Zeppelin's recording Jones plays triplets, twelve notes to Page's eight, from the beginning of "bar 4," but here the triplets are in the bass drum, they start later in the "bar"...and they're not triplets.

‘He that saith”The black dog is weird” knows not the truth - the weirdness is in the looking.’ - Melodius Qark, ‘What’s Jesus Laughing About ?’

@@doktabob328 i think we have the makings of a rock bible. Holy Trinity is Little Richard, Jimmy Hendrix, and Johnny Ramone.

Black dogs that. Climb ladders are.good luck omens

interesting point

They wanted to have a stop and start feel to the song like blues artists used to do back in the day.

@@trashychannel8150 hes saying that the studio vs live performances arent exactly the same so there must have been some tape splicings on the recording. i havent checked this though

No, it's a live recording. The pause time is free. On some remasters you can ear Bonzo givin a sticks "click" 1/16 before starting with the riff. (sorry for my english) to keep everyone in time.