 You're watching Blackstar Potential. My name's Lee Fuge and I'm from mgrmusic.com. And today in this video we're gonna be looking at the HT20 Mark II that I have next to me here and seeing if we can make that sound like Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page. The HT20 is a remarkably versatile amp and it can do a ton of different things straight out of the box. But one thing that a lot of us ask ourselves on a regular basis whenever we're buying new gear is can it sound like that guitar player that I like? So in this case, we're gonna look at Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. He is a player that's had such a varied career in terms of guitar tones. So I'm just gonna focus on a few of the key ones today. Now, obviously I'm not using the same rig as Jimmy Page and I'm not recording it in the same circumstances. So these aren't gonna be exact matches but this is gonna get you in that Led Zeppelin Tonal Ballpark. So if you're looking to play that kind of classic rock and those are the tones you're chasing, this video will get you on the right path to that. I'm using a remarkably simple setup for this video today. All of the drive tones you're gonna hear and the reverb all come from the amp itself and guitar-wise I'm using two guitars. So I'm using my Epiphone Les Paul Standard which I've had for the best part of 20 years. Now being a big Page fan, I had to own a Les Paul at some point and this was the first one that, you know, the first one I bought. This was my first proper guitar and you know, it's been through, it's been through the wars, it's got the scars to show for it and it's a real workhorse for guitar for me. I've, you know, become very attached to it in the time I've had it and I've always loved playing Zeppelin riffs on it. Alongside my Les Paul, I'm also gonna be using my Tokai Telecaster. You know, Jimmy Page used a Fender Telecaster in the very early days of Zeppelin. So I'll be using that guitar just to show a little bit of that tonal range off as well. Pedal-wise Page was never the sort of player that was gonna have a thousand pedals on the floor but he did use a few choice ones at various points in Zeppelin career. So I'm gonna be using two pedals in this video to accompany the amp. I'm gonna be using a TC Electronics Spark Mini which is just a clean boost pedal that I'm gonna use just to hit the amp a little harder for leads and I'm also gonna be using a Dunlop Crybaby. Now Page was famed for using the Vox Wah in the very early days. I don't personally own a Vox so I'm gonna use a Crybaby in place. If you're recreating some of these tones at home, you can do the same thing with a Crybaby anyway. The Boost replaces the Echoplex unit that Page used to hit the front of his amps a little harder. Now again, I don't personally own an Echoplex but any clean boost will do the same job especially with a great valve amp. You just need something to hit the front end a little harder and it will just give you that extra little push over the cliff with the gain. As you can hear from the opening riff which is a song called The Lemon Song off of Led Zeppelin II, I'm not using it on a gain. I'm using the overdrive channel of this amp with the first voice selected which is the slightly more British sounding voice so it has a slightly full and mid range. The gain is set to three and the channel volume is set to 10. Now I've done this just to create that pushed preamp vibe. Now this is also because the master volume of this amp is just set to one right now so I'm recording this in a very, very low volume environment. The amp is also mic'd with an Aston Origin condenser which I've got set about an inch from the center of the speaker just because I want a really wide picture of the tones this amp can do and that mic is incredibly sensitive to guitar amps and it really does capture the full spectrum of what we're after here. Remember that when Paige was playing these tracks live especially, he was using 100 watt Marshall through banks of four by 12 speakers. You know, we're doing this with a 20 watt amp and a one 12 inch speaker. So we're never gonna get the full sonic re-production but we're gonna get close. For the EQ I've got the bass and middle set to six and the treble all the way up. Now on a Plexi-style amp, they're quite bright so if you look at actual settings that Paige might use you probably find that his treble's not as high but like I said I'm recording this at a lower volume with a smaller amp. So we're gonna need to boost that treble a little bit just to compensate for what the amp would naturally do when you really open it up. I've got the reverb set to about four and the ISF is all the way to 10 which is all the way to the right which is the mid boosted side, the more British side of the voicing. You'll know the ISF control by now you turn it to the left, it's more American, right, more British. It scoops the mids at the left and sort of boosts them up and warms them up a little bit to the right. So we've gone full right for this because we need that British Marshall-y sort of sound. So like I said, Zeppelin are a band that there are no points in their career where there's just one definitive tone. Now Page changed his guitar sound and his recording methods every step of the way. So these tones are never gonna be exact recreations, like I said, we're just looking at that ballpark Page kind of vibe. So when we think of that typical Page rhythm sound we think of classics like, Oh, Lotta Love. Also tracks like Heartbreaker. The tones of Page is probably most famous for all of these real fire sounds. Now like I said that again these were probably recorded very loud in a studio in very specific conditions to meet Page's standards. He was known as a little bit of a controller in the studio but in the best possible way because he knew what he wanted Led Zeppelin to be. So to get a Page style lead tone I'm just gonna kick on that TC Electronics boost now, hit the front of the amp a little harder. Jimmy Page was the guy that was very, very into the whole guitar and he amplified talking to each other. So when it comes to clean tones he was never someone that had a bunch of overdrive pedals that he switched on and off. If Page wanted a clean tone he would just switch his Les Paul to the neck position and roll that volume down. This amp is extremely responsive to that sort of play. So if I switch to my neck position and I put my volume on 10 you can hear I've got quite a driven sound. If I just take that volume down all the way down, slowly reduces the gain. There comes a point here where I've got the guitar set to maybe about two on the neck pickup volume and the guitar starts to sparkle a little bit. This is that typical Page clean tone. He often switched between the two when he wanted light and shade as he referred to it. So he's got the clean on the neck position and the drive on the bridge position. Now, when you think of clean Led Zeppelin there's one riff you always think of. It starts like this. But that wasn't played on Les Paul. That was played on a twin neck Gibson SG which Page used 12 string and the six string for separate parts of the song. So again, it's not the exact tone but that's, you know, if you wanna play stairway that tone's pretty close. Page also used a slightly cleaner tone when playing some of those more tender lead moments like since I've been loving you off Led Zeppelin 3. So for this tone I've kept on the neck pickup. I've kept that volume rolled on to two but I'm just gonna keep the boost on just to give it a little bit of a lift. If you're a fan of those early Zeppelin records you'd have seen Page using one of these. Page famously had his dragon telecaster in the early days of Led Zeppelin. This was the guitar he recorded the first album with. So tracks like Good Times Bad Times. Now Page often used the bridge pickup as well just to add that little extra brightness. Again, he didn't use a black star amp obviously because we're talking 1968 here. He was using I believe Supro amps at the time but the settings that we used for the Led Zeppelin worked just as well for the telecaster. The tele will add that little extra bite that you need. This is also true of some of the more rocky numbers like communication breakdown. As I said earlier on in the video Page was also a fan of using a wah pedal. Now he used a vox wah. I don't own a vox wah so I'm using the Jim Dunlop BD95 which is the Billy Duffy model. This is a nice throaty sounding wah which is similar to the wah that Page used for some of those classic solos. So the typical Page guitar tone that you might hear with a wah would be something like this. Thank you all so much for watching. I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope the settings and tones we've discussed here help you get a little bit into that Jimmy Page ballpark. Now remember like I said, we're not using the same gear as Jimmy. I'm using the HT20 to try and get similar tones to those classic Led Zeppelin records from the 60s and 70s. So nothing here is an exact recreation. Just have some fun with it. We're getting in the ballpark of some great players. 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