And we are back with probably the most iconic guitarist since the electric guitar was invented - say what you want, but when anyone - even a normie - compares anything or anyone to Jimi Hendrix, you straight away know that that is a high bar to clear.
For me, I've been all over the place with Jimi since I started playing - from straight up not "getting" what the fuss was about, to be being flat out obsessed by, before levelling out to what I hope is a more considered position as someone who (in technique terms, at least) may not be in the same league as a Malmsteen, Vai, Satriani etc., but as someone who made a massive contribution to the electric guitar in its early years, redefined and hugely expanded the boundaries of what was considered possible with the instrument, and someone who still has plenty to teach a player who chooses to drill down deeply into his recorded works.
Since I refocused the blog for 2020, Jimi has cropped up every year along with SRV - giving you a pretty good idea of my influences as a guitar player - from a look at his blues days, to transcribing "Are You Experienced" and in 2023 "Axis: Bold As Love", so it was no surprise that this year I set myself the goal of transcribing all of "Electric Ladyland".. yeah. Someone forgot that EL was a double album, someone never bothered to heck that it has two tracks that are each 15 minutes long, and that someone, ladies and gentlemen.. was me.
So, I'm dividing this into two halves, with a view to finishing EL in 2025 (unless of course Putin has other plans for us all...) and I'm going to have to say... I'm not an unqualified fan. AYE was full of the "Holy crap, I can't believe we're doing this" enthusiasm of a band in their first flush of success, "Axis.." is (although lacking a little in guitar solo moments) a pretty tightly edited and focused album of great pop songs (mostly) written by a chap who just happens to be an incredible guitar player. By comparison, EL is what happens when nobody says no to you.
Don't get me wrong, the high points - "All Along the Watchtower", "Voodoo Chile" - are INCREDIBLE, even now, and there are some earworm tracks that are slow burn growers - "Long Hot Summer Nights", " Little Miss Strange" - but there is a lot of indulgence, tracks with no obvious structure or hook that I honestly think would have been edited out of the previous two albums - "Have You Ever Been To Electric Ladyland", "1983 A Merman I Should Turn To Be".
Certainly, reading accounts of how the album was recorded mirror some elements of SRV's "Soul To Soul" - excessive drug use, increasing detachment from reality, a record company enabling all the excess ad indulgence because they know damn well anything emblazoned with the right name will sell regardless... it's hard not to be a little bit cynical about the commercial imperative but also hard not to think "Jimi- you knew better". Certainly fellow Experience members Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell found themselves incresingly isolated from the recording process, exacerbating tensions within the band, hence why EL was the final Jimi Hendrix Experience album.
Your mileage may vary of course - and if it happens to be your favourite Hendrix album then fair play, I can see the appeal even if it's not necessarily for me...
But, however you look at it, it's a Hendrix album. Which means there is some phenomenal guitar playing on it... so let's take a look at some of it!
Let's start with the absolutely epic blues jam tht is "Voodoo Chile" - at 15 minutes long, this an absolute smorgasbord of E minor pentatonic blues licks - as anyone who follows the YouTube channel will be aware - and this one is a corker, about 12 minutes 30 seconds in, and shows Jimi in full on pedal to the metal mode:
E minor pentatonic (naturally) and this shows Jimi really milking a repeating pattern based around the 3 Magic Notes concepts (students of mine will recognise that) brought up on to the E and B strings - notice first the duynamic nature, Hendrix building tension with a held bend (D - b7 - into E - root), before into a flurry of repeating pentatonics before finishing with an even bigger bend, G (b3) bent into A (4th) and actually going slightly past the target pitch for the feel of the note going almost out of the atmosphere and into orbit!
Notice too the timings - 5 note groups on the first bar (use a 5 syllable workd like "opportunity" to keep yourself in time here) before developing into a blistering sequence of 32nd note ("helicopterhelicopter, helicopterhelicopter" ) - fans of Zakk Wylde might recll him doing a similar trick on the "No More Tears" guitar solo climax section.
In a s similar vein, here's a section nicked from the solo to "Come On (Let The Good Times Roll)" - again, E minor pentatonic, but Hendrix is mixing in the open strings - I should mention that this gets a little messy in place as Jimi really was gunning it and hoping for the best, so I've tabbed what I believe to be the "intended" lick:
Notice the mix of bends going on here - whole tone, half tone, amd pre-bend and the slightly unusual venture up to position 3 of the minor pentatonic as Jimi bends the 19th fret high E - although I suspect he was probably visualising the kind of E minor arpeggio we heard on Axis: Bold As Love.
The last bar contains one of his signature "up/down bends" that are all over Electric Ladyland, bending up on the 15th fret B, catching the G at the 14th fret and sounding the pre-brend as you bring the string down - if that sounds complicated, don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds and I'll be demonstrating how to do this in the upcoming video!
On the subject of arpeggios, these seem to have been increasingly becoming a part of Jimi's style, as they crop up towards the end of "Little Miss Strange", tracing the chord sequence Gb - Ab - Bb using second inversion shape (5 R 3) and colouring the basic triad by adding in the 4th and 3nd:
So if you've ever wondered where Yngwie got the idea from, wonder no more....
The last example is taken from the start of the solo to "Long Hot Summer Nights" using the Eb minor pentatonic and again based on the Magic Three Notes, but again, look at the string bending - whole tone, quarter tone (in between minor and major 3rd), repeated unison bend and then a classic blues/rock pentatonic run in the final bar concluding on the root note.
So we'll wrap things up there- yes, I know I haven't touched on "Voodoo Child (Slight Retun)" but I'm saving that for a more in depth video... although YouTube is not exactly short on tutorials on how to play that! Meanwhile I hope you enjoy playing through the examples, make sure to check in on the YouTube channel for the demonstration video (not for getting to like, share & subscribe - past 1000 now!) and I'll see you next month for...
...brace yourself...
..Allan Holdsworth!
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