Since I was 14 and got How The West Was Won for Christmas, I've been hopelessly hooked on Led Zeppelin. And once I started playing guitar, naturally I began the eternal search for Jimmy Page's elusive tones. Like most people, I can't crank a Marshall full stack at home, so I've done what I can to chase those tones at reasonable volumes, or even through headphones.

Madison Square Bedroom is therefore a place for me (and hopefully others!) to share their attempts at emulating Jimmy Page's captivating Led Zeppelin guitar tones at home, outside the confines of a huge stadium like MSG or at high volumes.

It's also a repository of Zep knowledge and trivia. I've long kept notes about Zeppelin, their history, Jimmy Page and his gear and playing style, as well as other people's attempts to chase down that elusive “Page tone” so many of us are entranced by (I've spent almost 20 years under the spell, and I don't see it waning any time soon).

So instead of keeping my notes and thoughts hidden away in a private notebook, I figured I'd share them here in hopes of providing a reference, and maybe even a little inspiration.

This is a general overview of some of the topics I intend to cover here. As it's a wiki, there are many series of deeply-nested pages, so feel free to dig around and explore. At some point I plan on doing a series of blog-like posts on a specific topic, e.g. my attempts at achieving a given bootleg tone, and will be placed in its own section.

• The Blog
• Jimmy's Gear
  • Live
  • Studio
  • Straps
  • Effects
• Tone Chasing
• My Gear
• Playing/Technique
• Bootlegs and Studio Recordings
• Links and Resources

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, want to contribute, have found any errors or omissions on the wiki, or for any other Zeppelin-related reason! I don't currently have new user registration open (to prevent spam), but I would absolutely consider it on a case by case basis if someone wanted to regularly contribute, or even just a one-off article.

madisonsquarebedroom @ lockbox dot email

There have historically been several really comprehensive websites about Page and Zeppelin over the years, but they often are old and no longer available, or only available via Archive.org backups. Two amazing sites were WholeLottaLed and led-zeppelin.org, which are now down, but still available on Archive.org. I plan on trying to migrate as much information from them as possible to Madison Square Bedroom, with notes where applicable where the info was sourced from. I hope both to keep that information alive on the Web, and to allow more people to be exposed to and appreciate it.

I would love for this site to turn into something similar (without the dead links!), and maybe find a way to share the underlying Dokuwiki code and data files so someone else could host it themselves.

So fair warning, my favorite era of live tones and performances are from around 1972. Generally I love anything from the earliest Dragon Telecaster into Tonebender days, up to the end of 1973, with some 1975 sprinkled in. I was introduced to that era first, primarily by HTWWW (instead of the more common starting point for most people, TSRTS), and I've spent the most time listening to that era as well. This is not to say I'm a '75 and onward hater, I just have a fondness for the earlier performance style, and especially the earlier guitar tones. That said, I do hope to use this wiki as a way to branch out and listen to and emulate the tone of (and maybe even review!) some late-career bootlegs.

If you ask on a guitar forum about achieving some famous player's tone, without fail you will get some helpful smartass chiming in with something like “It's in his hands! You'll never sound like them! Why don't you craft your own sound? Don't be derivative!” This unhelpful input tends to derail the conversation, and the original point of the thread is lost. I've thought about this plenty, and so I wrote a blog post about it, and how I think that idea is wrong and misunderstands the the goal of chasing a certain person's tone.

As a friendly reminder, I am not quite on Jimmy Page's level guitar player. I'm always trying to get better, but I do love gear and tone chasing, which tends to cut into practice time quite a bit. So please keep the talent critiques to a minimum :) Though constructive criticism or lessons are always appreciated!