You’ve Been Playing It Wrong #2

Sometimes, when learning a song like Stairway to Heaven, by the time you get finished learning it you’ve already started forgetting it.

And to make it extra funny – that can include the first note of the song. We can get so accustomed to playing the bass note and the melody simultaneously through other parts of Stairway that we forget it opens with a walkup arpeggio from the bass note that’s played entirely on its own. You say “of course it does – I knew that…” and I’d agree. I know you know that – but watch out, and keep your ear ready the next time you randomly grab your guitar and start playing Stairway. Did you start with the A on its own or did you pluck the A with its octave in the melody?.

And why wouldn’t you? The octave sounds lovely; our ear naturally wants to hear that melody note played there. Plus our fingers want to do it. Muscle memory is overriding consciousness and playing the two together.

What makes it wrong is that playing the bass note on it’s own establishes the chromatic descending bass line in a much stronger fashion that if we doubled it with a melody note at the same time. Our ears would jump right to the melody and miss the effect of that strong starting point and its chromatic descent. You could even argue that the bass line itself is actually the dominant melody in the figure;at the very least it’s a counter melody.  And unless you carry that awareness through your playing of Stairway you will find yourself doubling up the first note of the song more often than not. Here’s the first (half) bar as played by Jimmy Page on the Led Zeppelin IV original recording:

*Note: All audio files will be double posted here. One using an internally hosted embedded media player, and the other externally hosted using an embedded SoundCloud player

Didn’t catch that? Here it is again slowed down to half speed. (note both have been pitch corrected to concert pitch):

It’s not the end of the world if you double up the A with its octave when you play this – most wont notice and it’s a beautiful voicing so it will sound great. But you really do lose out a bit on the power of that descending bass line if you do. Remember too what Jimmy says about Stairway to Heaven (to paraphrase). He talks about Stairway being constructed in layers, starting with simplicity in both texture and tempo and increasing in complexity as new layers get added. What could be more simple than starting out fretting a single note: the note A.

Here’s the sheet music for reference.

Ex. 1 Showing first two bars. Note how the walk up starts on the bass note

I had a good laugh while recording The Original Stairway Project that I swore was going to be note for note (N4N) perfect when I realized I was blowing the very first note of the song in this same way. Even if my intention was N4N, I knew I better shut up about it if I was going to keep blowing the first note of the song. So I decided that my version would be “almost” N4N and always have a little wiggle room. Sometimes we all need a little wiggle room – not just in our Stairway covers but in life as well.

As always – have fun and enjoy playing the song.

Feature Image Credit: There’s nothing to it. by Jari Schroderus, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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