(Credits: Far Out / Dana Wullenwaber)
Mon 3 November 2025 17:30, UK
If not for one guitar string, the world might be a very different place, as that was all it took for Jimmy Page to realise that he could learn to play just like his heroes.
You have to keep in mind, when Jimmy Page was initially learning to play the guitar and becoming fully obsessed with the instrument that he would eventually be dubbed one of the kings of, the people who were dominating the guitar-based world were blues and R&B artists. Some of these performers, such as Muddy Waters, were bending strings, reaching pitches that jazz musicians prior hadn’t known possible. It looked impressive, and sounded even better.
Hitting those kinds of notes sounded a long way from where Jimmy Page started. When he initially started learning guitar, he did so on a beaten-up acoustic model that was handed down to him. Not that there’s anything wrong with an acoustic guitar, but it isn’t the instrument you want to use if you’re keen on playing like a blues hero. Page was trying to learn, but his sound wasn’t akin to his heroes.
Everything changed when he realised he could replace the G-string of his guitar with another B-string. The B-string was a lot thinner, and though it was more prone to breaking when put in the wrong position, it meant that Page was able to play the guitar like his musical heroes. From that moment on, the world of guitar music was well and truly opened up to him, and Page spent years mastering various genres and styles.
While we primarily know him as a rock guitarist, there are a number of different styles of music that Page has been celebrated for mastering. When he began playing in Led Zeppelin, he was keen on starting a band that celebrated the various strands of music he had been working with since he was young and since he had been playing as a session musician with a range of different artists.
“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, “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.”
In his exploration of various kinds of guitar music, Jimmy Page stumbled across plenty of different sources of inspiration, each of which played a huge part in his development as both a player and a lover of music. He doesn’t have a favourite kind of guitar style, it’s the various styles that exist which make him so excited, as he loves how people put their own spin on the instrument.
“The thing is, I really love all guitar playing,” he said, “That’s exactly the thing, hearing the guitar when I was a kid and just really appreciating even then. That you know, it’s six strings of an electric guitar but everyone will take on it their characters, so they are different. That’s the cool thing about it.”
Of course, even with such a universal love for the instrument intact, there are some solos that Page prefers better than others. One solo that he called more than perfect was the legendary work that you can hear on Steely Dan’s classic ‘Reelin’ In The Years’. When he was asked to rate the solo out of 10, Page went two points higher than that.
“Oh, I know this, that’s cool, I like that one,” he said, “Steely Dan, classic, that’s got to be a 12.”
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