Inside the Solo: Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven”

A shorter, less-produced video exploring how a great guitarist may have been thinking while playing an iconic solo — the first in the Inside the Solo series.

This installment digs into the scales and licks behind Jimmy Page's classic "Stairway to Heaven" solo. It's a companion to the written PDF lesson, which is available above.

Improvisation 101: Stairway to Heaven outro jam

Improvisation can be intimidating. If you’re just starting out, it’s important to realize that building and extending your skills can be a rewarding lifelong journey, but you will need to get comfortable sounding bad in order to eventually become good at it. That said, it’s not as hard as you might think to get started.

The obvious bottlenecks to improvisation include knowing what scales and arpeggios to use and which notes to emphasize when, but one frequently overlooked bottleneck is your brain’s attention and focus. This lesson will touch on all of these.

The outro solo section in “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin is a jam-session staple, and it’s a great but non-trivial place to start jamming. The original studio recording features one of the most well-known and memorable guitar solos of all time, and there are several valuable lessons embedded in it. So let’s dive in.

Get to know the chord progression

To improvise effectively, you will need to become familiar with the chord progression you are playing over, and you’ll need at least one way to think about it harmonically. In a jam session, the outro to “Stairway” is usually played as a repeated vamp over the chords Am, G, and F. The F triad is played twice as long as the other chords.

In the studio recording, the chords are slightly different and a tiny bit more complex (they play Am, C/ G, and Fmaj7), but the good news is that you can play over either variation without changing your general strategy. The same scales and target notes will work for both.

In both sets of chords, all of the notes come from the C Major scale. In music theory, when that’s the case, we call the chord progression diatonic, and as an improviser, we breathe a tiny sigh of relief because we can use one scale over the entire progression. The song and the vamp both start on Am, which makes Am feel like the tonal center of the song. So rather than say the vamp is in the key of C, we would say that it’s in A minor, or equivalently A Aeolian.

Chord tone soloing

One of the most powerful and commonly used approaches to improvisation is to choose a “home base” scale that fits with the chord progression and then highlight notes from some of the chords as they go by. Sometimes those target notes can fall outside the scale, and that’s okay. This approach is a foundation of what’s commonly called “chord tone soloing.”

Given that Am sounds like “home,” the Am pentatonic scale is a logical place to start for improvisation on this chord progression, and it’s a great choice. In fact, Jimmy Page opens his iconic solo with a lick in the standard “Form 1” Am pentatonic box at the fifth fret.

But rather than jump onto the fretboard right away, let’s take a look at how the notes of the various chords fall against the backdrop of the Am pentatonic scale. First, here’s the Am pentatonic scale played on one string:

If we overlay the notes from the Am triad, we get this:

As you can see from the diagram, the three notes of an Am triad fall directly on top of notes from the scale. This is great news because it means that most of the scale notes will sound harmonious against that chord. The ♭7 is not in the chord, but it works as an extension of the triad, so it sounds good too. The 4th is the only note in the scale with a little dissonance. Dissonance isn’t a bad thing, but it’s something we’ll want to be aware of and control.

The second chord is G major. The root falls on the ♭7 of Am pentatonic, and the 5th falls on the 4th of the scale. The major third of G is not contained in the Am pentatonic scale, and it’s one semitone away from the ♭3 of the Am pentatonic, so that scale tone won’t sound great against a G major triad. The 5th of the Am pentatonic is the 6th of a G chord, which would provide a little bit of dissonance.

The third chord is F major. The third and fifth of the triad fall on the root and ♭3 of the Am pentatonic, so those notes sound great. However, the chord’s root is not in the scale at all. In fact, it’s one semitone away from a scale tone, which could get us into trouble if we’re not careful.

Here’s all of that in one chart:

And here’s a version to go with the chords from the studio recording:

Notice that C/G fits a little better with the Am pentatonic scale than G does. It turns out that doesn’t matter much because we’re going to treat the middle chord as a passing chord and mostly ignore it.

Starting simple

Inside the “Form 1” pentatonic scale is a shape I call the “stack”. It consists of three adjacent strings with notes two frets apart stacked on top of each other.

All five notes of the minor pentatonic scale can be found inside this shape, and I can’t stress enough how important it is to memorize where to find the root. You will use the root location constantly in improvisation. It can be helpful to know where to find the other intervals inside the shape, but you can always figure those out in a pinch.

To make this easier, learn how the notes of the Am and F triads sit on top of the Am pentatonic stack:

Notice again that the root of the F triad is one semitone away from the 5th of the pentatonic scale. If you study the phrases in Jimmy Page’s solo, you’ll see that several of them end on that F note. And now you know why.

Exercise 1: Spend some time playing over the “Stairway” chords using just this shape in just one position. Practice creating two-bar phrases that flow through one repetition of the vamp. Psychologically, the first and last notes you emphasize are the ones that will make the strongest impression on the listener, so practice starting your phrases on a note from the Am triad and ending them on a note from the F triad. Don’t always use the same target notes…mix things up! Explore how each note sounds against each chord, and practice controlling the amount of dissonance you create and resolve. This is a great example of attention management. By limiting yourself to a small region of the fretboard and thinking about target notes for only two chords, you are (hopefully) leaving your brain some space to focus on musicality.

Note that at the beginning of the phrase, you can bend the D note in the upper bridge-side corner of the stack a full step up to E, which is the 5th of the Am triad. Use hammer-ons and pull-offs within the stack. Slide into or out of your target notes. Add vibrato to taste. If you can’t create at least a few good-sounding phrases with this small pattern, you’re not yet ready to expand to other parts of the fretboard. But when you are ready…

Expanding across the fretboard, part 1

On a 6-string 22-fret guitar, there are 11 different non-trivial places to play the stack. If the guitar was tuned all in 4ths, we could just move the stack around without changing its shape. But on a guitar fretboard in standard tuning, the interval between the G and B strings is a major 3rd, which distorts any shape that falls across it (I call this “the warp” after Jon Finn’s original “warp refraction threshold”¹ ).

So If the A note falls on the G or B string, you will need to adapt the shape of the stack to the warp.

It’s well worth spending some time working out licks in these two warped shapes as well as the non-warped stack.

Exercise 2: Try moving the stack to other locations on the fretboard. This is a great time to practice finding all the A notes across the entire neck.

Expanding across the fretboard, part 2

In all of these stack diagrams, the note in the upper bridge-side corner is the same as the one in the lower nut-side corner, played one octave higher. That means that stacks connect to each other diagonally on the fretboard. If we had a seven-string guitar tuned all in 4ths, it would look like this:

In standard tuning, there are two pathways using just stacks that cover most of the fretboard. These are by far the most frequently-used ways that guitarists move up and down the neck.

Exercise 3: Practice making phrases that move from stack to stack. Don’t forget to stick the landing with a note from the F major triad. You can always find an F note one fret toward the bridge from the lower bridge-side corner of the stack!

What about the rectangle**?**

If you’ve seen my video on the rectangle and stack approach to the pentatonic scale, you’re probably asking yourself how the rectangle fits into all of this.

First, let’s take a look at how the target notes of the Am and F triads fall on the A minor pentatonic rectangle:

Exercise 4: Spend some time creating phrases in the rectangle that target chord tones in the Am and F triads. Remember that the lower bridge-side note in the rectangle can be bent up a whole step to an A note, which is valid target for both chords.

Exercise 5: Practice creating phrases that move from the stack to one of the adjacent rectangles or vice versa. Depending on which stack location you’re using, there are up to four possible stacks nearby. Just don’t forget to take the warp into consideration as you move from shape to shape.

If we add the F note to the pentatonic, is this a new scale?

If you’ve read my lesson on the “Dickey Betts hexatonic scale,” you may have noticed that the figure showing the F triad overlaid on the A minor stack is exactly the same shape used to make the Dickey Betts scale. The big difference is that the root falls in a different location within the scale. The Dickey Betts scale is based on the major pentatonic scale, so the added note is a 4th, whereas here it is a ♭6.

We could call this the “Jimmy Page hexatonic scale,” or we could call it an Aeolian or Phrygian mode, minus the 2nd scale degree. But to be honest, I don’t really think of this as a scale of its own, and I doubt Jimmy Page does either. The simpler mental model (which is, therefore, the one that’s more likely to be accurate) is to make phrases with the Am pentatonic scale and sometimes end on an F note because it fits the chord.

What next?

It’s a challenge to maintain the listener’s interest when playing over a sustained vamp like this. Jimmy Page is a master at building intensity over the course of a solo, and his studio solo is a great example.

Exercise 6: I highly recommend learning Jimmy Page’s original solo. With what you now know, you can break it down phrase by phrase and understand which notes he targets to start and end his phrases. Try making your own variations based on his licks, and then get out there and jam some “Stairway” with your bandmates.

Happy jamming!