HENDRIXOLOGY
Illuminating the musical mechanics of a guitar master.
Jimi Hendrix is rightfully acclaimed as one of the most inventive, influential and creative electric guitarists in history. In his tragically short career he greatly expanded the possibilities of the instrument and left an indelible print on how the guitar – and its technologies – is played to this day.
However, despite this almost mythological aura around his playing, there is relatively little deep analysis of his musical mechanics. Which is a wasted opportunity, as he is a supremely interesting guitarist in terms of harmony, fretboard strategies, articulation, timbre and rhythm. He was also deeply interested in all types of music. He adored and drew influence from blues, funk, folk, Western classical music, jazz, Indian classical music and soul, as well as his contemporaries in the rock sphere.
Ironically Hendrix’s other-worldliness came from embracing, without prejudice, the music of the world. He was also diffident and humble about compliments on his musicianship, and thirsty for musical knowledge, taking lessons on harmony from Miles Davis – he is quoted as saying in an interview that he wanted to take a break from his career to attend music school, learn to read music, and “study and think”.
In the spirit of this endless curiosity, I’ve taken three iconic Hendrix tracks (one from each of his three studio albums Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland respectively) to have a look at, and illuminated some of his brilliant guitaristic and musical ideas, using some contemporary analytical approaches.
PURPLE HAZE
This track is a great example of Jimi’s sophisticated and inventive use of harmony and dissonance. To appreciate this there are some fundamental concepts to understand about harmony.
1. Tonality. There is a ‘centre of gravity’ in pitches and chords, some more unstable than others and there is one – the tonic note (and the tonic or ‘I’ chord) – that feels most like ‘home’ around which the other notes and chords circulate.
2. In tonal music, keys are typically either clearly in major (which includes a major third) or minor (which includes a minor third).
3. Intervals – the relationship between notes – are variously consonant (think ‘settled’ or ‘smooth’) and dissonant (think ‘scrunchy’). Dissonance tends to occur away and leading to the tonic chord, where there is typically more consonance. Purple Haze twists and subverts these norms in several ways. It is clearly tonal – in the key of E – but that tonic note is given a constant delicious dissonance. The introduction plays repeated Es against Bbs. E and Bb create a tritone interval. The tritone can be a particularly dissonant interval. Despite the common myth, it wasn’t ever banned from music making, and here Jimi embraces the dissonance repeatedly and directly.
Jimi’s love of dissonance is also clear in his use of the ‘Hendrix chord’. This chord (in this case E G# D and G) is often shorthanded as a 7#9 (dominant 7 sharp 9) and is extraordinarily rich despite just having four notes. It contains the two spiciest intervals: a tritone between G# and D, and a semitone clash between G and G#. It also contains both a major and minor third. Jimi repeatedly uses this chord as the tonic ‘home’ chord, and so there is a bittersweet angular flavour to the entire track. This major-minor ambiguity is also evident; it intermingles chords (and scales) from the key of E minor and E major.
LITTLE WING
While guitar duties are often separated into ‘lead’ and ‘rhythm’ roles, Jimi was a master and innovator in the ‘chord-melody’ approach, where both are effectively performed simultaneously.
Inspired by the playing of soul and jazz guitarists like Curtis Mayfield and Wes Montgomery, Jimi developed this approach into a beautiful signature style. While he used this in some form on every one of his recordings, Little Wing (see also The Wind Cries Mary, Castles Made Of Sand, Wait Until Tomorrow, Bold As Love and the sublime Angel) is a celebrated example.
Jimi’s chord melody style relies on two skills: the ability to play any chord (major, minor or dominant 7) not as a single fixed-position object, but in any position on the fretboard; and the ability to embellish these forms with small (two to three-note) chordal elaborations. Little Wing is a beautiful progression of major and minor chords, and these skills allow them to be treated with a harmonic fluidity, providing both harmonic support to the vocals and lead guitar but with an engaging melodic improvisational freedom.
Figure 2 (below) compares the concept of ‘G’ from the perspective of a normative ‘strummer’ to Jimi’s sophisticated and expressive all-fretboard vision (for the benefit of most readers this has been presented for right-handed players). Jimi would play these chords with melodic and harmonic colourations (usually 9ths, 6ths and 4ths) as ‘extensions’ to the chord, or used with slurs and slides for melodies in two- and threenote mini-chords and to connect up positions. Of course, he could transpose this to play over any root of the major chord, and had similarly elegant structures for minor chords and blues contexts.
Also embedded in Little Wing (and missing from most transcriptions and performances) is Jimi’s mastery of rhythmic swing.
VOODOO CHILD (SLIGHT RETURN)
In most music theory an emphasis is placed on pitch (scale, melody and harmony) and rhythm (meter, syncopation, phrasing). And in Voodoo Child (Slight Return) there is much to say about the use of major-minor ambiguity, the ‘Hendrix chord’, micro-tonal bends, call and response, and a light semiquaver swing feel. However, an underlooked form of musical expression is timbre – i.e. the tonal quality of a sound. While guitarists can be obsessed with tone, it is often equated to ‘having a pleasing sound’; an attractive ‘serving plate’ for the melodic ‘food’. Jimi, however, shows that timbre can be used as a distinct and central form of musical expression, whatever the pitches used. While timbre is multi-dimensional and endlessly complex, even a simple consideration can be very useful, and reveal patterns in Jimi’s playing.
Let’s look at resonance, which we will define here as the amount of high frequency versus low frequency content – it’s the quality of brightness versus mellowness in a sound. Jimi manipulated this extensively by plectrum attack, playing muted strings (on their own or together with played notes). He combined such techniques with the use of his pickup selector switch (with five varying timbres from mellow to bright), fuzz pedal and of course wah-wah pedal, which provides a continuous foot-controlled level of resonance.
Voodoo Child uses an inventive combination of playing approaches and technological manipulation. Jimi would also leave a characteristic resonance in place (for example, by pushing the wah-wah pedal to its brightest level and leaving it there) to colour an entire section. An illustration of some of his strategies with the wah-wah pedal are shown in Figure 3 (below). Such techniques – in combination with Jimi’s fretboard knowledge, rhythmic feel and harmonic invention – go some way to revealing his enduring influence and legacy.