Jimi Hendrix has been dead so long sometimes it’s hard to believe he was once alive and, almost certainly, playing the guitar. But his influence continues to be by far the biggest on guitar players – old and young and from beginners to advanced. I have made here a few general observations about his playing. Any factual errors I am grateful to have pointed out. The opinions are obviously my own.
The first and most important thing to note about Jimi Hendrix is that from the age of about 12 he played guitar as much as he possibly could. In his youth this would have taken the form of rigorous practice. He was self-taught so he would have worked out his own regimen, but it would have been impossible for him to have have attained the level of technical proficiency that he did without a great deal of work. Hard work is not necessarily something that most people associate with Hendrix. This is a mistake. Hendrix worked very hard indeed. Firstly by mastering the rudiments of guitar very quickly – probably by about the age of 15, secondly on the blues/r’n’b (’chitlin circuit’) package tours from 1962 to 65 and thirdly as a star in his own right. Recording, touring, interviews, promo – it’s astonishing that he found time to take all those drugs and have sex with all those women as well as developing such an extraordinary guitar style. Obviously, he was prepared to put the hours in.
The second most important thing about Hendrix’s guitar playing is its absolute fearlessness. He played at very high volume but this is not the same thing. His playing is always bold, prepared to take risks, always restlessly searching for new ways to play the old licks. In his later months (for his career as a successful composer and performer can be measured in months rather than years), one can imagine how frustrated he must have been at having to play material that no longer interested him, and his heroic and usually successful attempts to find new ways of playing it.
Hendrix’s guitar style did not appear out of nowhere. His time on the soul/r’nb package tours would have afforded him the opportunities to study many highly accomplished guitarists at first hand. Who knows? He probably sat in dressing rooms with the likes of Albert Collins, Ike Turner, Bobby Womack, Steve Cropper, Buddy Guy, Earl Hooker, Magic Sam, Curtis Mayfield. There’s no doubt that he was an exceptionally adept study. He absorbed all of the stylistic traits of these as well as listening closely to the recordings of Albert, Freddy and B B King, Otis Rush, as well as the usual Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and John Lee Hooker. More unusually, he was also interested in the old pre-war country blues of the likes of Robert Johnson which he might have come across trawling the folkie dives of Greenwich Village in late ’65/early ’66 when he had more or less given up on making a career for himself on the soul/r’n’b circuit where had had served his apprenticeship. This is also where he encountered the music of Bob Dylan which had such an effect on his development as a singer/songwriter. It can’t be overstated how much Hendrix loved Dylan but this had little bearing on his guitar playing beyond, perhaps, underlining for him that occasionally it’s OK to just play simple tonic chords in root positions.
Much has been made of Hendrix’s fondness for 9th chords. Certainly he used the #9 chord a great deal. So much so that it is often referred to by musicians as ‘The Jimi Hendrix Chord’. The #9 chord is a very dramatic chord. It contains both the major and minor 3rd, creating what musicologists sometimes call ‘false relations’. Is it major or minor? Either way, Jimi used it a lot. It’s the signature sound of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”, “Purple Haze”, “Stone Free”, “Foxy Lady”. But Jimi liked the suspended 9th chord a lot too. He would construct melodies around strings of suspended 9ths (eg, the intro and outro to “Castles Made Of Sand”), and would insert them into the choruses of otherwise ‘heavy’ songs like “Fire” and “Foxy Lady”. He liked suspended 9ths on minor chords too (“Villa Nova Junction”). A thorough understanding of how to use 9ths is central to Hendrix’s style.
The bedrock of his guitar playing is, of course, the blues – at which he was an absolute master. As a straight Chicago style blues soloist he was at least the equal of any of his contemporaries (Magic Sam or Buddy Guy, for example) and streets ahead of such as Eric Clapton or Mike Bloomfield. His ability to use the blues scale in the most exquisitely expressive way – his control of bends, dynamics, his use of space (eg, the Albert Hall take of Elmore James’s “Bleeding Heart”), all mark him out as by far the most impressive blues player of his generation. But blues was just one of the styles he played. He also knew jazz and soul, and he also created his own uniquely mutated blend of psychedelia. The late Ian MacDonald and the very much alive Charles Shaar Murray have pointed out that the songs Hendrix wrote when he first came to London in Autumn ’66 are as much in thrall to The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows” or The Who and The Yardbirds experiments with feedback as they are to the black American musical traditions that Hendrix had grown up with. From the guitar playing point of view this leads us to the other most important element of Hendrix’s style: His use of the guitar as a sonic sound source. He would use everything at his disposal to create new aleatoric musical sounds. Obviously a lot of this was achieved with effects pedals: wah-wah, fuzz, phasers, dopplatone etc – very primitive by today’s standards but absolutely up to the minute for the late 60s. In the studio he would spend hours playing with backwards tapes, stereo echo, flanging etc. But strictly from the guitar end, Hendrix used every possible sonic possibility the Fender Stratocaster could offer. Interestingly, he never (to my knowledge) experimented with open tunings and he only ever used slide in the most casual way (a beer can, a lighter, a knife) but the slide solo on “All Along The Watchtower” remains a miraculous achievement. I have never heard anyone able to replicate it. He would routinely remove the plate at the back of the guitar that housed the springs for the tremolo unit and use these springs in his music. He was an unsurpassed master at the use of the tremolo arm and would also use the pick up switch to create rhythmic asides (eg. “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”). This side of his music is well represented on “3rd Stone From The Sun”, “EXP”, “And The Gods Made Love” – all of them quite unique in their way and quite extraordinary in the context of music that was ostensibly described as ‘pop’.
Hendrix liked to dabble with jazz. His use of a perfectly executed tritone substitution at the end of the 2nd chorus of “Villanova Junction” at Woodstock demonstrates that he was conversant with jazz harmony (whilst gesticulating to the rhythm section what the hell was going on) but one senses that he was wary of jazz – of getting in too deep. In interviews he was sometimes quite scathing about people playing endless choruses of “How High The Moon” and showing off for each other so it’s possible he had some bad experiences in his early career. Nevertheless, the whole of Miles Davis’s ‘electric’ phase (from “Bitches Brew” and “In A Silent Way” through to “Pangea”) is unimaginable without Hendrix’s influence, likewise therefore the whole Mahavishnu/ Return To Forever thing over which we will draw a discreet veil for present purposes.
Hendrix played loud electric guitar and, apart from one absolutely gorgeous exception (“Hear My Train A-Comin’”), never played acoustic. But at even the highest volume, he played with great care and attention (unless he was upset or angry, which did happen sometimes). He would routinely turn the amplifiers up full and used the volume control on the guitar for all his wide dynamic interplay. His dynamic range was absolutely enormous, possibly still the widest of any electric guitarist. The delicacy of “Little Wing” or “The Wind Cries Mary” – interpolating those beautiful Curtis Mayfield double stops combined with his own little melodies in 4ths and suspended 2nds, so hard to finger and even harder to make them sound just right – these could give way at a moment’s notice to simply the biggest guitar sound ever heard (it still astonishes me to think that “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” is just ONE GUITAR.)
I think that’ll do for now. If I think of anything else, I’ll add it.
Bottom line: You want to play like Jimi Hendrix? PRACTICE!