Red House-styleTo get close to Jimi's sound you'll need a gritty Fender Stratocaster neck pickup tone like the one on Red House for some of these examples. Others require a more distorted Fuzz Face-type bridge pickup sound.
As if introducing a 12-bar solo, this example borrows a few trademarks. The pentatonic phrasing is done by ear, rather than following a scale, because Jimi didn't read or write music. Pay close attention to details like the wide vibrato, frequent quarter-tone bends and staccato hits. This is where the magic lies!
Altogether more aggressive, this example is more representative of Jimi in mid-flight. The classic repeated figure gives way to some soul-influenced doublestops, which were such favourite moves of his. There's more staccato stuff going on and notice how much more attitude those last doublestops have when you bend them up a quarter-tone.
Now we're really flying! Though this is superficially more technical, the feel always comes first. It takes a fair bit of hand strength to execute stuff like this, so don't be impatient. And even if that's not a problem, you can never spend too much time refining the details…
To bring our imaginary solo to a triumphant conclusion, here's a great Hendrix-style finish. The bend/doublestops turn to a more relaxed pentatonic descending then classic ascending pattern. And those last two chords were a lot of fun to play.
This is a chromatic tapping frenzy. Bars one and three are based on a six-note, 16th triplet phrase. In bar two, the chromatic tapping continues as a 32nd-note phrase in groups of four. It's hard for the fretting hand to keep up, so practise slowly at first.The final bar has an implied Am11 sweep that features a slide and position shift, followed by a tap, then a string-skipped pentatonic. This last bit is a cool flash riff to have in your armoury!
