Jimmy Page

Page arrived in Led Zeppelin with something almost none of his peers had: hundreds of London session dates and a producer's ear. He heard guitar parts as arrangements — a riff doubled an octave apart, an acoustic layer under an electric, a solo panned against its own delay — and that arranging instinct is why Zeppelin records still sound enormous on modern systems.

His live playing was loose, occasionally ragged, and deliberately risky. The studio Page is exact; the stage Page is a gambler. Both matter, and the tension between them is a large part of the band's mythology.

The other half of his legacy is production technique: distance-miking amplifiers to capture room ambience rather than close-miking everything, an approach he pushed against studio convention and which reshaped how heavy guitar is recorded.