Jimi Hendrix, Castles Made of Sand, Little Wing, a Gmaj chord lesson

John Watt

Member
Okay onacarom! I said this already when I first posted this in Music Reviews with alcaponedudu, Eduardo,
but I'm feeling the same enthusiasm for making YouTube videos,
as I did when I got my first Crybaby wah-wah pedal,
always playing with that until I got to be where I wanted to be.
I'm not showing guitar playing technique and styles, like you are,
I'm just demonstrating part of a song and can see doing more.

The ending chord passage to "Castles Made of Sand", using a Gmaj variation,
is the most difficult guitar part I have ever tried to figure out and play.
No use repeating my YouTube commentary, so here it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYKbXFUG1ac
 

John Watt

Member
Oh yeah! After watching the video I realized something I did without realizing it.
When I'm saying you can play the open G chord as a barre chord formation,
without using the G note on the high E string, I start to add some one finger notes,
saying you can do things with it, and then I play some two note riffs.
Those are my favorite Stevie Ray Vaughn riffs, but they're not off any of his albums.
He was a session player for Billy Joel, doing that song that starts
"we walked down the beach beside that old hotel, they're tearing it down now, but it's just as well".
Stevie is using a more mellow and clean jazzy tone, if the guitar parts are all his.
He just plays the two note riffs, not holding down a barre chord at the same time as I am.
 
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John Watt

Member
Hmmm! This might turn out to be my how to play like Jimi Hendrix... thread... or string theory.
Here's something I can just tell you about, what to do if you want to jam along to get some riffs.

Jimi put out a live album to have a new album to satisfy his recording contract,
before he fled to England and a girlfriend in Germany.
He had been kidnapped, held in a cabin, and rescued by record company employees,
after a gunfight. He was making more than the Beatles or Rolling Stone did, at the time.

The songs on Band of Gypsies really aren't chord progressions.
I see them as repetitious bass lines that allowed Jimi to jam all over them.
So you can jam along, with drums, bass and Jimi playing and singing.
These are all slow to slacker beats, and it takes a lot of tone to get into the mix.
This album was compiled from the best tracks made from two nights of recording,
and I would expect them to be dubbed together to get the best moments from both nights.
I've seen photos of Buddy Miles, the drummer, and Billy Cox, the bassist,
playing in the studio to create parts to be dubbed in.

On "The Cry of Love", what would have been Jimis' next album,
there's one song with a basic rhythm track and one lead guitar track, playing wah-wah.
I see the basic rhythm track as being a bed track so Jimi could experiment with Crybaby lead guitar.
It's a lazy, almost Chuck Berry rock and roll rhythm, working down three chords, like E and D to A.
I haven't heard that for a long time, and haven't seen the album for sale for over thirty years.
That's in real life, not looking at jimihendrix.com. Yeah... let me work for you and do a link.
okay... okay... I'm riffing you, having that easy one memorized.

http://www.jimihendrix.com

The one track rhythm and one track lead with one track of Jimi singing, is "Belly Button Window".
It's about a child in the womb looking out and being afraid of the world he's seeing.
Jimi takes his use of a wah-wah pedal into areas of expression that stand alone in the world.
I would think he had to be sitting to get so much control.
Some guitarists say he used a Crybaby with both feet to get that, but no, you can't do that.
There's no screamy or voodoo chile heavy riffing, but baby gurgling and chuckling and... and...
yeah... it takes a very floppy foot to get into what is basically poly-rhythmic and anklerspraino timings.
If you plug in a Crybaby in reverse, you get what they call "squelch". That's not in there.

Another tune on "Cry of Love" is called "Pali Gap", another slow jam, Jimi trying to make some desert sounds.
He said that in an interview, saying he never really got the kind of desert sounds he was looking for.
That's another interesting lead style, with a repetitious bass line that is accented by the guitar, a few overdubs.

The nice thing about calling the toll-free number for the Jimi Hendrix store, are the employees.
They're all Seattle musicians, like to talk, and the one product I ordered was better than I thought.
That's the big as a double bed blanket "Are You Experienced" artwork you see behind me in the videos.
I bought another one that had a Hendrix psychedelic graphic, not an album cover, and sold that one.
$30, about seven years ago.

You can tell artists and photographers liked Jimi, because they used him for their own artistic creations,
so I'm not surprised employees in Seattle are like that too.
When I phoned the Beethoven museum to ask about getting a piece of his piano to use as an electric guitar inlay,
saying I was calling long distance from Canada,
I think she put a loud metronome beside the phone and just left it there, making me hang up after a while.
It's one thing to be clicking here for free on Magle.dk, it's another to pay long distance for tick tick ticking away.
 
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