Sure, Jimi Hendrix was known for having an eccentric personality—and for being an equally wild and unpredictable guitarist. But look past all the psychedelic mayhem and you’ll find some of the most beautifully melodic, rhythmically complex and harmonically uncanny solos in rock.
“Purple Haze,” for instance, features some amazing fuzzed-out sounds, but it also boasts a mini masterpiece of an introduction, as well as an E Dorian solo to die for. And while “Third Stone from the Sun” is about as psychedelic as it gets, it does contain one of the most memorable octave riffs in the annals of rock.
Hendrix could also tear you heart out with romantic single-string melodies (“May This Be Love”), or take you to faraway places with silky-smooth lines (“All Along the Watchtower”). And as anyone who’s heard “Red House,” “Voodoo Chile” or “Rainy Day, Dream Away” knows, he could turn a blues phrase like no one else.
So let’s take a look at a few of Jimi’s more melodic soloing concepts and then put them together in a solo example.
DOUBLE-STOPS
Some of Hendrix’s most brilliant lead work lies in his double-stop-based R&B solos and fills, found in songs like “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Castles Made of Sand” and “Little Wing.”
FIGURE 1 is an example of his chord-tone approach over a I-ii-vi (G–Am-Em) progression in the key of G. Staying exclusively within the G major scale (G A B C D E F#), this example intersperses adjacent-string dyads with single-note lines. Notice the liberal use of grace-note hammer-ons and pull-offs, which tend to involve the 9th, 11th and 13th tones of their corresponding chord.
FIGURE 1
THE HENDRIX MINOR SCALE
Hendrix often used the minor pentatonic (add2) scale (1 2 b3 4 5