Hi, all! I’ve gotten curious recently about my personal favorite guitar hero, Jimi Hendrix, on a more technical level than I’ve looked at him via before, but I’m running into a challenge:
The vast wealth of resources on Hendrix’s style are essentially capped at an “intermediate” level of technical analysis.
It’s been explored to death that Hendrix used his thumb, favored double-stops, [blah, blah]. For a very passable facsimile of his style, those surface-level details are all you need, since he never really hit the kind of speeds where CTC-type technical knowledge is even needed. You can successfully play Hendrix’s lick vocabulary “verbatim” with a wide variety of movement solutions—and this is exactly the problem: because it’s easy enough to play anyway, there seems to be zero analysis of how he actually played it.
Why do you even care about this? Just play his licks however you want.
Getting this one out of the way to hopefully streamline discussion: I can already play his licks just fine. I’m interested in his style and how it influenced his playing. Things like hand position and mechanics influence note choices, and I want to understand how his mechanics affected his choices. It’s more about understanding the player than the playing.
Do we have a starting point?
It’s been previously documented that Hendrix was a (primarily) USX player with substantial downward pickslant and (surprisingly) trailing-edge picking, with Fender medium celluloid picks and a supinated hand position. He did have a lot of variability in his picking, rotating his forearm (to a DSX/UPS position) for short sweeps and rakes, and he would pretty freely move his pick up and down along the strings for showmanship purposes and to change the harmonic content of the note.
For his right (fretting) hand, his chord strategies and thumb are the most documented aspects. Independently, I’ve noticed two things that I haven’t seen described elsewhere: he seems to have used a leverage-based rotary vibrato technique a la BB King, and (more interestingly for my purposes) he used his second (middle) finger for FAR more three-fret stretches than most players. His very pronated fretting hand angle meant that his second and third finger had almost the same reach, and I suspect that this synergy is at the root of a lot of his phrasing. (Side note: sometimes, his pinkie visibly curls behind the fretboard while he plays, thereby giving a heart attack to every guitar teacher ever.)
So what are you asking about, exactly?
Does anybody have any insights into his hand mechanics for his faster phrases? There aren’t a ton of readily-available examples of that fast playing, although I found a reddit thread where somebody had linked a few time stamps of some of his faster live licks.
I know the answer may be “no,” and I have to just scour video until I can find clear enough examples to give me the answers I’m looking for. But on the off-chance anybody has any clues, I’ll be very grateful.
