News Nothing standard: The unique way Jimmy Page would tune his guitar
For guitarists, tuning is usually one of the most annoying chores you must do. Even though it’s annoying having to change the tuning of your guitar to suit whatever song you’re playing, it’s a necessary evil to prevent you from sounding dreadful the minute that other in-tune musicians start playing with you. While most of us rely on tuners these days, Jimmy Page thought the next best thing was on a keyboard rather than a guitar.
Then again, deciphering what Page did on the guitar half the time was a lost cause, given how many effects he used. Considering how much wah and echo went into his guitar riff on ‘Heart Full of Soul’, people seemed to be listening more for the tone rather than the individual notes being played.
When Page was first starting out as a guitar player, he had started earning his keep as part of a choir. Instead of having to rely on someone who was in tune to get what he needed, Page remembered that one of his choirmasters, Mr Coffin, remembered him tuning to the organ that they had instead, telling Guitar World, “Mr. Coffin [said], ‘Oh yes, I remember young Jimmy coming to the choir practice early with his guitar to try and tune it to the organ.’ Where there was a will, there was a way!”.
Whereas most people see standard tuning as the beginning and end of their guitar prowess, the rest of Page’s career would be about toying with the sounds he heard in his head. As far as he could tell, the standard tuning setup was just a suggestion, and there was a lot more to explore once he explored other tunings.
Throughout half of Zeppelin’s catalogue, Page would bend his guitar into weird shapes to suit whatever he needed. Although a song like ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’ was known for being tuned one half-step down, Page had already begun using tunings like open C and DADGAD when working on his acoustic material, turning in songs like ‘That’s the Way’ and ‘Friends’ with that unconventional approach.
By the time he had got to work on albums like Houses of the Holy, Page was practically inventing his own tunings without knowing what they were called. Take ‘The Rain Song’, for instance. That is a tuning that you’ll probably not find in any other tablature book in history, spelling out a strange open chord that Page messed around with until he got that beautiful song out of it.
It’s not like that approach to tuning hasn’t rubbed off on future generations, either. Despite being compared to Led Zeppelin at every turn, Soundgarden has followed Page’s lead in terms of strange open tunings, either using them to get open strings on ‘Burden in My Hand’ or to get the most menacing metal tone possible on ‘4th of July’.
Then again, that approach to tuning may have just been a way for Page to push himself forward as an artist. He may not have been looking to become a musical inventor or anything, but if he had a tuning that was alien to him, he would have much rather learned what he could do to make the guitar speak than try to tune it to suit his needs.
