Led Zeppelin – Friends Guitar Lesson


In this Friends guitar lesson video, I will show you how to play this acoustic classic by Led Zeppelin in it's entirety.

Jimmy Page used an open C6 tuning for this song, so you will need to tune your guitar to that in order to follow along with this video lesson and the original recording. Those notes are, starting from the 6th string, C A C G C E.

This is one of those acoustic guitar songs that sounds great just as an instrumental. Even without Robert Plant's fantastic vocals, the guitar parts alone are so musical that they could form their own instrumental.

There is an intro section which introduces some of the chords you will be playing throughout the rest of the song. However, it is the main riff that starts around the 22 second mark that is the real star of the show.

This main riff can be a little tricky to play with it's quick double-stop melodies on the top 2 strings. It is very repetitive though, so after you get the melody notes down, it probably won't give you too much trouble.

After that, the verse section uses an octave shape that moves up and down the A string with lots of drone strings surrounding it. The melody being played by those octaves is the same as the one being played by the string section. It has a nice ethereal sound to it.

The main riff is then used as the chorus and we go back through those sections again.

Towards the end of the song there is an outro section that once again uses octaves albeit with a slightly different melody. The cool thing about these octaves and the drone open tuning is that you can create a very full and beautiful sound without it being very difficult to play.

I hope you guys enjoy learning this yet another beautiful acoustic track from the great Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin!

Carl...

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Led Zeppelin - Friends Guitar Lesson

1 Comment

  1. Jon Sweeney on October 18, 2022 at 2:42 pm

    Thanks a lot for that lesson,Carl. I love that song and tour lesson made it very easy to play!

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