Stairway To Heaven

Song：Stairway to Heaven
Artist：Led Zeppelin

Stairway to Heaven
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Stairway to Heaven" is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. The song's instrumentals were written by Page "over a long period, the first part coming at Bron-Yr-Aur one night".

Page always kept a cassette recorder around, and the idea for "Stairway" came together from bits of taped music.The song's main guitar line is similar to a guitar line from an instrumental track called "Taurus" by the band Spirit, with whom Led Zeppelin were acquainted in their opening days.

The first attempts at lyrics, written by Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant next to an evening log fire at Headley Grange, were partly spontaneously improvised and Page claimed, "a huge percentage of the lyrics were written there and then". Jimmy Page was strumming the chords and Robert Plant had a pencil and paper.

The song consists of several distinct sections, beginning with a quiet introduction on finger-picked acoustic guitar and three recorders and gradually moving into a slow electric middle section, before the faster hard rock final section. Page stated that the song "speeds up like an adrenaline flow".

Written in the key of A minor and mainly in common time, the song opens with an arpeggiated, hybrid-picked guitar chord progression with a chromatic descending bassline A-G#-G-F#-F. John Paul Jones contributed overdubbed wooden bass recorders in the opening section and a Hohner Electra-Piano electric piano in the middle section.

The sections build with more guitar layers, each complementary to the intro, with the drums entering at 4:18. The extended Jimmy Page guitar solo in the song's final section was played for the recording on a 1958 Fender Telecaster plugged into a Supro amplifier.Three different solos were recorded, with Page agonizing about deciding which to keep.