HENDRIX CHORDS

NO GUITARIST HAS influenced music and culture as profoundly as Jimi Hendrix did. Even before burning and smashing his Fender Stratocaster during the bombastic finale of his 1967 Monterey Pop Festival performance, the visionary musician had revolutionized the world of electric guitar with his unique approaches to playing the instrument and using it with his amplifier and effects to create new, otherworldly sounds.

While Jimi’s innovative lead guitar style has been widely analyzed and imitated by countless players in the decades since his passing in 1970, one aspect of his six-string artistry that is equally groundbreaking and often overlooked is his approach to playing chords and rhythm guitar. This is where he stands far above his many imitators. As Hendrix famously demonstrated in his ballads, he would often ditch standard barre chords in favor of melodic phrasing built around and woven into chord inversions. In this lesson, we’ll explore this and other aspects of Jimi’s rhythm guitar style and technique with original examples inspired by such signature songs as “The Wind Cries Mary,” “Castles Made of Sand” and “Little Wing.”

INVERSIONS

In music theory, a refers to the vertical arrangement, or “stacking,” of notes in a chord. For example, an A major chord is made up of three notes, A, C# and E, which are the root (1), major 3rd and 5th, respectively. If you play these three notes together, for which the root is the lowest note, being on the bottom of the voicing, or “in the bass,” as they say. If you take the A note and move it up an octave, it then becomes the top note of the voicing, rendering the ascending order of notes C#, E, A. The chord is now in what’s called , for which the 3rd, C#, is in the bass, Likewise, flipping the C# note up an octave leaves the 5th, E, on the bottom of the note stack, giving us what’s called a voicing, for which the 5th is in the bass