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Achilles Last Stand


Californiaman

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So I know this could easily go into the lessons section of the forum, but I'd thought I'd throw a few things out there I learned or discovered about one of my all time favorite songs.

 

Achilles Last Stand is great. No, scratch that. It's epic. At just over 10 minutes long it is Zeppelin's third longest studio recording by the band (In My Time of Dying at 11:06 and Carouselambra at 10:34)

Page used an astonishing 12 tracks to record his guitar parts on it. He did all the overdubs in one session.

 

John Paul Jones had his doubts though about Page's ability to incorporate an entire guitar scale in a certain part of the song. That part is the beautiful run up the neck starting at 1:58 in the song. I play it on the E and B strings where he plays an E minor scale up the neck.

I learned to play it this way, but I'm sure you can work out another way. The opening two notes of the scale starts with open E on the first string followed by C on the second string.

 

The scale is essentially this:

E-C, F#-D, G-E, A-F#, B-G, C-A, D-B, E-C And I'm sure you can figure out another position on the neck to play it.

 

Much of the song is done in E dorian or E minor.

 

That's all I got at this time. Feel free to ad what you know. I know there's some good youtube videos on line

 

Like this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBox37tSmqk

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlRjjGc6pJA

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By the time I'd gotten around to buying "Presence", I'd been a Zep/Page freak for a while, and was pretty good at figuring out passages on guitar.

 

I was able to nail that intro to "Achilles' Last Stand" pretty quickly. Weird F#m to weird Em type chords... with lots of Phase, of course. [biggrin] Whether he was actually using a Phaser or not was beside the point.

 

"Presence" is that "un-sung" Zep album that has SO much epic music on it. I love that album.

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"Presence" is that "un-sung" Zep album that has SO much epic music on it. I love that album.

 

Yeah I like it too - drums, bass, electric guitar and vocals. Straight rock!

For Your Life and Nobody's Fault were 2 of the highlights for me on the O2 show and Archilles was a great live rocker. [thumbup]

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