Stairway to Heaven

You know it had to be here. Many aspiring guitarists can sort of play this one.

With a little hard work we can make that sort of, a totally! ...or at least a mostly.

The intro is probably the most famous section of the song. Notice how the bass notes of the chords in the first few bars descend a half-step with each change. I think the trickiest part is the G to Dsus4 pull-off transition in bars 11 and 12.

Slow it way down if you need to, but don't skip it!

After two repetitions of the intro riff, we play another 8 bars. 

This time with some 16th note arpeggiation to lead us into the chorus!

Here's the first chorus! The tempo has also altered from roughly 71 to 77 by this point.

I say roughly, because tempos are often more variable in older tracks, when recordings were more typically done in a live band setting.

It's actually after the chorus that we get our first verse in this song, which is a little uncommon. Another oddity in this verse is that the whole thing is nine bars. It's a four bar pattern, but we play the first bar one more time before jumping back into the chorus.

The song repeats chorus and verse no less than FOUR times, before moving on to this brief interlude.

Okay, deep breath. After the interlude comes the guitar solo. The tempo has moved up to 98 now.

This is a 20 bar solo with lots of challenging material. I've broken it into three parts.

Part one is the most straightforward, we're working with the A Minor Pentatonic here, which we've spent a lot of time on together.

You'll need to be comfortable with whole step bends to make this section work.

Also, in bar 3, we have a grace note. That's a note that falls before the beat - basically, you want to time that slide so that the 10th fret note falls in the right spot.

Part two is the most technical section. Bars 7 and 8 move through Form 3 and 4 of the Pentatonic before locking into a tricky triplet lick in bars 9 and 10.

Notice that the lick there is comprised two 8th notes and two 16th notes, in triplet form.

Since we know two 16th notes equals the length of an 8th note, we can see the lick as a group of three 8th notes in triplet form.

Three 8th notes in triplet form have the same length as one quarter note! So the whole lick is one beat long, and we can confirm that since there's 4 repetitions of it in each bar.

Understanding this helped me to play it with correct timing.

Part three has a little more breathing room, but demands some large bends, and ends with another fast triplet lick.

As a reminder, a step and a half bend (1 and 1/2) is three frets, and a two step bend is 4 frets.

That might be asking too much of your guitar depending on the setup, but more often than not, you just need to push the string farther than you're used to.

If you really can't get these bends, you can always start from a higher note, or just substitute slides for a similar effect!

Made it! The ending of the song gets pretty layered and makes some alterations to the ending riff as it goes on, but we'll keep it simple here.

Close out the song with this full on rock riff, with tons of percussive string noise. Remember that the tempo is 98 now!

Like I said at the start of the lesson, a lot of guitarists have partially learned this song, but not many can really perform it well from start to finish.

When you work through this material, be sure to make a note of problem sections, and return to practice them again, until you master it. That's the difference between weak and strong players.

Once you can play everything on the page here, try playing along with the song, or seek out additional tablature and round out the additional guitar layers not covered here. Good luck!