So you want to sound like Jimmy Page. Join the club! The thing is, though, reality can be a curmudgeonly old beast, and to sound like Page, we might need to have lived as Page, serving an apprenticeship as a studio session player, jobbing in the Yardbirds before forming the greatest rock band of all time.
But, hey! There’s no harm in trying, and even if playing like Page might require some foot-switchable Crowleyian magick, there are all kinds of readily available gear options - guitars, amps and effects for all budgets - that will get you in the ballpark tone-wise, or at least on the same cosmic plane...
Electrics
Page has used a cornucopia of guitars throughout his career but let’s focus on those that were essential to his sound. And more to the point, those guitars we know he used, for with Jimmy Page, there is legend piled high over myth.
Fender Telecaster
There’s surely one place to start with Page, the Fender Telecaster, and it just so happens that Fender has recently reissued two Teles that were developed with Page to replicate his legendary and much-loved ’59 Telecaster that Jeff Beck gave him as thanks for recommending him for the Yardbirds gig.
This Telecaster featured a 'top loader' bridge, making string bends easier, and was soon “consecrated” by Page, who glued eight mirrors to its body, before stripping the White Blonde finish and adorning it with a painted dragon. It appeared all over Led Zeppelin I, turning up again for the Stairway to Heaven solo.
There are a number of newly commissioned master-built Jimmy Page Telecasters, signed by Page himself. Expectedly, these strictly limited edition models cost a mint, and are extremely hard to find now. But the Fender Artist Series Jimmy Page Telecaster is still widely available in both Mirror and Dragon, and besides coming equipped with two custom Jimmy Page ’59 Telecaster pickups and, capturing all the treble-forward energy of Page’s early Zeppelin tone, these are a seriously awesome late-‘50s spec Teles.
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Gibson ’59 Les Paul
Jimmy Page’s number one was famously sold to him by Joe Walsh (then of the James Gang, later of the Eagles) in 1969 for just $1,200, and would go on to replace his Telecaster as his weapon of choice.
Featuring a set of sealed Grover tuners, and a push-pull knob for out-of-phase “Peter Green” tones, it has been described by Page as his “mistress and wife”, and was meticulously replicated in the mid-‘00s by the Gibson Custom Shop and shipped with a quite stunning Authentic Sunburst finish aged by master builder Tom Murphy.
Sadly only 150 or so were made, and when they turn up on sites such as Reverb they typically command prices between $8,000 to $10,000.
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The Danelectro
You can’t talk about Jimmy Page’s guitars without mentioning his 1961 Danelectro 'short horn' 3021/DC59. With its lipstick single-coils and semi-hollow Masonite/poplar construction, it is a work of 1960s futurism that has a magic of its own, and was most famously used on Kashmir.
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12-strings
There is perhaps no guitar that expresses classic rock’s sense of ambition and aesthetic excess than the double neck Gibson EDS-1275, which Page used live to recreate the ethereal majesty of Stairway to Heaven. But in the studio it was a Fender Electric XII that offered Stairway’s 12-string choral depth.
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Acoustics
Page used a lot of acoustics used in his Led Zeppelin days. He most famously used a Martin D-28, a Gibson J-200 and a Harmony Sovereign H-1260. But there was also an EKO Ranger 6 and an E-Ros Dakota 606 amongst others.
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Amps
Not only were PA systems underdeveloped in Led Zeppelin’s early years, but the power with which John Bonham hit his drums necessitated plenty of volume from Page’s amplifiers.
Live he used all sorts, including a solid-state (and very expensive) Rickenbacker Transonic on his first tour to the US, before alternating between the likes of the Marshall SLP-1959 and his own custom Hiwatt heads, which were famously used at the Royal Albert Hall and had a warm British crunch that inspired a Catalinbread overdrive that we will list below.
Of course, it was a different ball game in the studio. For Led Zeppelin II, Page was said to have used a Vox UL4120 Hybrid amp head - certainly, the pictures would suggest so - but Page’s studio tone would forever be associated with his use of a Supro combo, most likely a modified Thunderbolt, which had enough hair and teeth to take a hot blues tone and make it heavier.
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Pedals
It was interesting when Led Zeppelin got together for the Celebration Day performance in 2007 to see Page using a MIDI pedalboard switcher with a DigiTech Whammy pedal.
Those technologies were not afforded to Page in the late ‘60s. The search then was always for more sustain and a little more gain. To that end, Page used a Tone Bender fuzz box, designed by Roger Mayer.
Equally significant was Page’s Echoplex tape delay, which not only added that delicious echo effect with organic decay, but warmth via its preamp. Page also used a variety of wahs, and an MXR Blue Box Octave Fuzz – most notably on the Fool in the Rain solo.
But none of these got too far in front of that connection between his guitar and his amp, and the use of his volume controls to control how much gain was in his signal.