Hendrix rhythm guitar lesson 1 - major chords

Hendrix’s rhythm guitar playing was every bit as impressive as his soloing. Endlessly inventive, he could seemingly play forever without running out of ideas.

That said, there are some features of Hendrix’s rhythm guitar playing which crop up several times in his recordings. In particular he often used the major pentatonic scale to embellish major chords, rather than simply strumming a bar chord for a whole bar.

In this lesson we look at this aspect of Hendrix’s rhythm guitar playing. We take the two most commonly used major bar chords (CAGED shape 1 and 4) and identify the major pentatonic notes that Hendrix often used in conjunction with them.

After identifying these major pentatonic notes, we see several examples of Hendrix-style phrases. We do this for both bar chord shapes. We also look at both one-bar phrases and half-bar phrases.

If this is a new area of rhythm guitar playing for you, it may take some time to get comfortable with improvising these kind of phrases in between strumming chords. But, stick with it; it gets much easier with practice.

The final stage is to apply these Hendrix-style major pentatonic phrases to chord progressions. We briefly look at applying them to basic chord progressions of Hey Joe and The Wind Cries Mary.

As always, incorporate these suggestions into your guitar practice regime, and try to apply these ideas to other songs that use major bar chords.

These approaches to rhythm guitar playing are both fun for you the performer and good for the audience too. So get to work!

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[povilasslivinskas]

Thank you very much for the lesson, this has got to be the simplest and most straightforward introduction to a very hard practice

[SB-dtin]

Congratulations for the work, always a great guitar lesson!

[MA-vrgp]

Man thanks so much for the lesson that really helped...been picking around on Jimi for awhile now but this made it so much clearer as to what he is actually doing.

[raymondo]

Hi Stuart. Just found this - it's very good. Is it possible to do a video on how Hendrix used his thumb to make chords and his little finger to add embellishments? Thanks.

[grantfleming]

The action must be super low on that strat almost every string is buzzing sounds awful but not your playing lol