This great Zeppelin song is fun to play and very good practice for beginners. For the main guitar, there are only 3 main riffs, each is quite short. Learn these and you will soon be able to storm your way through the whole song!

For beginners this tune ticks a lot of the right boxes - the riffs are quite easy and repetitive, all the fingers are used, and there is a little positional play (but not too much). There is just enough to push your boundaries, without getting lost or overwhelmed. Remember to work in chunks and go slowly first. Get it right before building speed. Go as slow as you like and keep repeating a riff until your fingers 'just know' where to go, then start speeding up.

NB - We've omitted the long keyboard parts at the start / middle of the song because there's no guitar during those.

Riff 1 - Descend through an A minor blues scale. Repeat that 4 times. This is a great practice riff as well as a strong intro to the song. It is used a few times in the song as a link between song sections.

Riff 2 - This is the main lick. It's not too evil to get, but will demand some practice. The tricky bit is the quick positional change. In other words, switching from this note (A) to this note (G) means a fast change of your hand position, by shifting it up the neck by a couple of frets. The other positional change is when returning to the beginning of the riff as it repeats again. From there, just keep repeating it.

Riff 3 - Just ascend through the A major scale. Repeat. Nice.

There are a few places where half of Riff 1 is used - like here (by the way, this part is followed with a gap as Guitar 2 takes over for one of the riffs). But apart from that, everything else is just switching between these 3 riffs.

None of these riffs are very long, and they loop very well. This makes them great for practice. Keep repeating each riff and build up the speed, you'll be playing along with Jimmy in no time. Next we'll look at the lead parts.