Learn Hendrix style: the hands, the shapes, and every side of him

1. Where it comes from

Hendrix learned by ear, from records, playing Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Albert King and Freddie King lines off 45s with friends in Seattle.^[25] Then came four years as a sideman on the chitlin' circuit — the Isley Brothers (he is the guitar on their 1964 "Testify"), Little Richard's Upsetters, sessions with Don Covay and King Curtis^[19] — and a run of dates behind Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions with Billy Cox.^[21] That apprenticeship is the rhythm style: Mitch Mitchell said Jimi was "the first person I ever met who could play all of those incredible Curtis Mayfield rhythm parts right off the top of his head",^[21] and Cox names "Little Wing", "Castles Made of Sand" and "Drifting" as the Mayfield in him.^[7] Joe Satriani names the R&B mentors as "Curtis Mayfield, Ike Turner and Steve Cropper", who "had devised creative ways to fill out musical arrangements with small chord voicings, voice leading techniques and an overall sense of melody".^[36] The other teachers were Steve Cropper — 6ths slid on the third and fifth strings, muted chords on the backbeat, one-note fills — whose devices a university lesson lays out from "Green Onions" and "Soul Man",^[29] and the blues players whose bends and vibrato he made his own: Albert King ("Red House" grew out of King's "Travelin' to California"^[6]), B.B. King's wrist vibrato,^[10] Buddy Guy.

Two academic readings frame the rest. Milton Mermikides (Gresham College, 2025) treats the guitar as a fretboard with many places for one note, and Hendrix as a player who chose the place for its color; he shows the chord-melody fluency ("two- to three-note elaborations that extend and connect chords"), the sixteenth-note swing of "Little Wing" moving phrase to phrase between even and heavily swung, and the E7♯9 as one of only four "all-interval tetrachords", a tonic that keeps its dissonance instead of resolving it.^[1] John Hanford's University of Washington dissertation on Band of Gypsys reads the late music as "a neotraditional work comprising linked traditional and progressive musical features", blues and R&B and jazz drawn on in the licks, the chord usage and the pitch organization.^[2]

The blues, the jazz, and Dylan. The blues in him is wider than the slow twelve: "Voodoo Chile" grew out of "Catfish Blues", his Muddy Waters homage with verses from "Rollin' Stone", "Still a Fool" and "Rollin' and Tumblin'", and Charles Shaar Murray calls it "virtually a chronological guided tour of blues styles" from the Delta through Muddy to B.B. King and "the cosmic blurt" of Coltrane;^{[46] [46b]} the set he opened Monterey with was Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor", Hubert Sumlin's riff "at a faster tempo, with a different rhythm guitar and bass line", and B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby" "speeded up considerably and thoroughly rearranged";^{[39] [51]} and alone with a twelve-string in a London studio in 1967 he played "Hear My Train A Comin'" as "100 percent country blues", Lead Belly's tuning, Robert Johnson and Skip James in it.^{[41] [41b]} The jazz is there too: "Third Stone from the Sun" opens with "a Wes Montgomery-style octave guitar melody line" in E Mixolydian; "Up from the Skies" is "a breezy, jazz-based stroll" with Mitchell on brushes and "delicate wah-wah"; Miles Davis said he "liked the way Coltrane played with all those sheets of sound, and played his guitar in a similar way".^{[49] [45] [48]} And Dylan: "All Along the Watchtower" was cut with Dave Mason on twelve-string and Hendrix "shouting chord changes" at him, the version built, Albin Zak writes, by "three basic strategies" — the gestures intensified, dissonance let in, "a long-range, goal-directed melodic line" — with Muddy Waters' "deep tone with a heavy beat" in the shout.^[47] Roger Mayer, who built his pedals, gives the setup: mid-sixties Stratocasters flipped and barely modified, stock pickups ("one of the most vastly overrated parts of the guitar"), a string set of .010 to .038 with a .015 for the G so the guitar is not "G-heavy", tuned down a little because a right-handed guitar strung left-handed resonates differently, the Octavia "on the solo to Purple Haze".^[38]

The players behind the player

Who taught what, in the sources' words: the blues he learned off records, the rhythm and blues of the circuit, the band, and the readers this page leans on. The Reverend Horton Heat's page has a players table for a genre; this one is for one player's teachers.

2. The hands: the thumb, the shape, the split chord

Almost everything in the rhythm style follows from one grip. Instead of a first-finger barre, the thumb comes over the top of the neck and frets the root on the low E string; the first finger is then free, and so are the others.^{[12] [6b] [34]} With the bass note under the thumb, the hand strikes the D, G and B strings on their own — the triad inside the E shape, the "split chord" — and the spare fingers hammer onto the shape: the 4th onto the 3rd on the G string (a sus4), the 6th onto the 5th on the B string, the 9th onto the octave on the top string.^{[8] [9]} Guitar World's lesson: "the low G root note on the sixth string is fretted with the thumb", the pinkie "add[s] and remove[s] certain notes while moving from the first string across to the third", and the hand begins "by fretting the second and fifth of the chord and then hammering on from the second to the third with the ring finger".^[35] Mermikides notes the choice of exactly those three colors — 4th, 6th, 9th on a major triad; 7th, 9th, 11th on a minor — is not arbitrary: they add color without a leading-tone pull, "grounded" extensions that keep the chord where it was.^[1] Guitar Player's five rules of the rhythm style are the map of this page: funk figures with the pinky barred ("The 4th finger bars the notes E and A at the 5th fret"), open-string sounds ("double-stops, trills, slides and other embellishments amidst open-string drones"), the thumb voicings, double stops "derived from pentatonic scales" with "a higher note [that] typically rang throughout, while a hammered-on embellishment occurred on the lower string", and "pentatonic fills in horizontal rather than vertical fashion".^[34]

The same hand converts every barre shape: the E-shape major and minor, the A-shape and C-shape majors with the 3rd often in the bass, the minor-7 shapes with the root on the 5th string, the add9.^[7b] The Pickup Music course goes shape by shape through the CAGED system and pairs each with the records: the E shape and the thumb with "Little Wing" and "Bold as Love", the A shape and the slides that connect two shapes with "Wait Until Tomorrow" and "Castles Made of Sand", the G shape's double stops with "The Wind Cries Mary", the C shape's major-7 colors with "Castles" and "Angel".^[11] Satriani's R&B guide puts "a major pentatonic-based 'toolbox'" under each chord — the 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th as "two-note harmonies to embellish the sound" — with a barred index and a hammer-on "from the ninth to eleventh fret".^[36]

The grips

Most of these are one hand. The thumb-over E shape is the core; the split chord, the hammered 4th, the 6th and the 9th are that hand with one finger moved, so they sit under it as variations, and the 9th chord under the 7♯9 the same way. The rebuild added the hands of the seven feels it brought: the thumb-over 7th for the shuffle, the maj7 inside the barre for the major ballad, the open E7 the country blues and the Catfish riff sit on, the E-shape m7 with the pinky free, the 9ths a fret apart and the 13th for the jazz shuffle, the thumb barre at the 10th for the riff rock. Every one is in the Chord finder, tagged Hendrix with the name given here. The fingering is in the dots — T is the thumb over the top of the neck — and the number beside a diagram is the fret it starts at for the chord named; a shape with no number sits at the nut, where a ring above a string is an open string and an x a string left out. Where the hand is not obvious, a line under the grip says where the other fingers go.

The changes, with the grips

The common changes his songs run on, played with these grips: the chords alone — whole and partial, the thumb's bass note and the split chord, the stabs and the 9ths, the strum, the riff where the riff is the chord — with no fills or runs, so the hand can learn the changes before the lines between them. Each is fixed: the same tab every time it is opened. Open in drills puts the same changes on the Drills tab with the part's own strumming pattern at any tempo, and any other pattern a click away. Neck on any card draws the chord as it's fretted, or the scale under the hand, and lights each note as it sounds — the way the Jam tab's neck follows a part.

The Hendrix chord. E7♯9 is E, G♯, D and G: a dominant 7th with the ♭3 on top as a ♯9 — both thirds at once, a tritone between the 3rd and the 7th, a semitone clash between G and G♯. It was jazz and R&B vocabulary long before 1967 (the Beatles had it on "Taxman"; Hendrix himself first recorded it on the Isleys' "Testify"), and "Purple Haze" is where it became a rock tonic.^{[5] [20]} On "Foxy Lady" he plays a simpler form of the grip without the major 3rd;^[16] MusicRadar calls it "the great man's best known signature chord" and names "Crosstown Traffic" beside the other two.^[10b]

3. The scales: where the notes live, box by box, each with its riff

The box under the chord. The E-shape barre and the "E shape" pentatonic box share their root on the low E string, so with the thumb chord under the hand, the box is under the hand too: the fills between chords are the pentatonic of the chord you are holding, played off the top three strings of the same position.^{[9] [8]} The Blackstar lesson maps each chord of an A–F♯m–D–E progression to its own major-pentatonic box (shapes 1, 5, 3 and 4) and connects them by descending lines; Guitar World's phrasing lesson organizes the whole neck as "five areas, or positions" of the E minor pentatonic and adds "the occasional added 2nd (F♯), 6th (C♯) and bluesy flattened 5th (B♭)".^[37] The app's Jam tab does the same thing in the Chords reading with the position window.

The minor pentatonic over a major chord. The solos on "Purple Haze", "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" and "Hey Joe" are the E minor pentatonic — E G A B D — over chords that are major or dominant; "using a minor scale over major chords creates that signature tension".^{[17b] [17] [15]} The ♭5 (B♭ in E) turns it into the blues scale, and the major 3rd is let in against it as a passing color.^[15b] On the slow blues both pentatonics are mixed — "the B7 chord voicing, B minor pentatonic, and B major pentatonic" layered in "Red House".^[16b] In the app, a part marked blues plays the minor pentatonic over a major chord in the Pentatonic reading and the blues scale in Scales; the parts below say which.

The box at the 12th and the box above it. "Hey Joe" is soloed from the E minor blues scale at the 12th fret;^[15] "The Wind Cries Mary" from the F major pentatonic in 12th position;^[15c] "All Along the Watchtower" from the C♯ minor blues scale at the 9th with Dorian notes.^[15d] Mermikides describes the solo on "Purple Haze" as Dorian over E5, F♯5 and D5;^[1] Hooktheory's analysis puts the "Crosstown Traffic" verse in C Dorian.^[33] The app writes the Dorian 6th and the 9th as free notes — exact pitches the reading may not otherwise offer.

Moving between shapes, and the bends. The lead lines connect the boxes rather than staying in one: slides along a string, a phrase up in the next box and a drop back, the same slur-and-slide shape moved along the neck.^[10] The unison bend — the B string bent a whole tone up to the note held on the E string, "one with a string bend and one with a fretted note" — is the sound of "All Along the Watchtower"; the "catch" or exchange bend pushes two strings and sounds them on the way up and down; the staccato bend of "Foxey Lady" is muted at its peak and then given "rapid BB King-style vibrato, rotating your wrist rather than moving just your fretting finger"; the vibrato elsewhere is "wide and slow … but with control", from the forearm; the ♭7 is bent "a whopping two whole steps, to the 9th".^{[10] [37]} In the parts, a note with reach may sit up to five frets past the position, and comes back.

The shapes on the neck, and the drills

Each drawn in the fingered key of the records it belongs to. The ringed notes are the roots; a hollow note is a color let in beside the box; a dimmed note is in the scale but not in the chord it's played over. Under each figure the box is played as a drill over its feel's band — up and down — and then as a riff written from that box note by note, so the scale is learned as music: every note of the riff is the drill's or is marked as the one note outside it, and every riff ends on the root. Neck on a card shows where each note is as it sounds; Open in drills puts the same scale, box and tempo on the Drills tab, where the pattern, the notes a beat and the shapes are yours to change.

The box at the 12th, and the box under the 7♯9 grip

The same box at the nut, and the box above it

The blue note, and minor over major

The Dorian colors, and the sweet register

The two pentatonics mixed, at the 7th

G Mixolydian at the nut

The box under the thumb-over A7

The Angel box

The country blues box

The Fire box

The Watchtower box

The jazz shuffle's box

The box at the 12th, slow, over one chord

The hand moving

4. Exercises

In order, and before the parts: each is a part or a piece of one, at a tempo to start from, and each is fixed — the same tab every time it is opened, so it can be learned note for note. Play it here, then open it in Jam, turn it up as it settles, and change the key. The neck (on the card, or in Jam) lights the notes as they go; Fingering on a card puts a chord diagram over each change of grip; Fingering and technique and Troubleshooting fold under every card.

5. The feels: rhythm, lead, and both at once

Each feel below is a way he played, with its cards beside it: the rhythm part the app's engine plays over the feel's band, drawn as tab with the rhythm under it; the lead part, a pure line written against the chord it sits on so it follows the changes; and the mixed card, the rhythm part with the blend on Mixed: the figure in the figure bars and a lead line in about half the fill bars, the way a player who is the only guitarist does both. Play loops a card here; Open in jam opens the Jam tab with the same key, progression, feel, part and roll, where the same switch gives you Rhythm alone or Lead in every bar; New roll on these cards gives the same part another realization, so the fills you learn are the part's, not one tab's. The blues parts play the minor pentatonic over the major chords; the chord-melody, the ballads and the R&B stay major.

Soul ballad (the Little Wing way)

The chord is the melody. The thumb takes the root on the low E, the fingers strike the D–G–B triad on the "and", and the hand keeps moving inside the shape: the 3rd hammered up to the 4th on the G string, the 5th to the 6th on the B, the octave to the 9th on the top string; a double stop out of the pentatonic box answering; 6ths and 4ths slid between chords the way Mayfield and Cropper played them; the lead the chord already had, through the Leslie. The band is soft — a rim click on 2 and 4, the bass on roots, the hat with a little bounce — and the sixteenths swing a shade, the way the record's do.^{[1] [8] [7] [34]}

Fuzz riff (the Purple Haze way)

The E7♯9 as home — major 3rd and ♯9 in one grip, a tritone inside it, a chord that never resolves, so tension is the state of the song (Mermikides). Around it the ♭III and the IV, and a riff in the E minor pentatonic with the ♭5 let in, doubled with the bass and muted between the notes; the other fuzz rhythm is the power chord with the open strings ringing inside it ("Spanish Castle Magic", "Stone Free"). The lead is the box under the grip and the box above it, the unison bend, the trill, the rake. The band drives: kick on 1, the "and of 2" and 3, the snare hard, the bass in eighths on the root.^{[1] [4b] [15b] [13b] [43]}

Slow blues in 12/8 (the Red House way)

The twelve-bar in 12/8 he played in B (a half-step down on the record), the IV as a 9th chord. The comp is the T-Bone/B.B. grip — the 9th chord with the root on the A string, slid in from a fret below, the 3rd trilled against the 4th — and the lead is a voice: major and minor pentatonic mixed over the dominant chords, bends of a step and a step and a half (Albert King's), the shake, rakes, triplet pull-offs, and silence. The band lays back: the ride on every triplet, the bass climbing root–3–5–6.^{[6] [16b] [10]}

Funk rock (the Band of Gypsys way)

The funk of the last year: sixteenth-note scratches with the wah rocking under them, the 9th and the 7♯9 punched on the "and of 2", a single-note riff on the low strings with muted ghost notes between the notes, doubled with the bass — Guitar Player's first rule, "booty-shaking chord shape" voicings and single-note riffs with "muting, slurs, trills and bends", and the wah of "Who Knows" with its "rapid foot movement and wide sweeps" in polyrhythm with the beat. The kit is tight — kick on 1 and the "and of 2", ghost snares, the hat in sixteenths with a bark on the "and of 4". "Freedom", "Ezy Ryder", "Power of Soul", "Message to Love", "Little Miss Lover", "Gypsy Eyes" are the records.^{[34] [48] [19] [49]}

Cycle of fourths (the Hey Joe way)

Five major chords each a fourth below the last — C, G, D, A, E — and two bars of E to land on. The guitar holds thumb-over chords and walks from root to root on the low strings between them (root, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and the 5th is the next chord's root, which is only true because the chords move in fourths), with double stops out of the E-shape box answering the vocal — the "passing bass notes" of MusicRadar's rhythm lesson. The lead is the E minor blues scale at the 12th fret. The band is a slow backbeat, the bass walking up into every change.^{[15] [9c] [10b]}

One-chord voodoo (the Voodoo Child way)

One chord, and everything happens on it: the intro of muted sixteenths with the wah rocking (the "West African even-before-Bo-Diddley beat", as Wikipedia has it), then the riff in the E minor pentatonic — the 4th bent to the 5th and released, the pull-off to the ♭3, the octave, the 7♯9 stab — and a lead that is the box at the root, the box above it, the machine-gun repeated note, the step-and-a-half bend held with vibrato, feedback-length notes, "the pentatonic trill and dive" with the bar. Straight sixteenths in a heavy pocket.^{[4] [17] [1] [10] [11b]}

Rhythm and blues (the Wait Until Tomorrow way)

The up-tempo R&B of his sideman years, as he kept playing it: the chord on one, then the licks between the chords — double stops hammered in the E shape (the 2nd rolling onto the 3rd, the 4th onto the 5th), 6ths on the backbeat, a Stax chuck on 2 and 4 — over a bass on the root and octave and a drummer on the backbeat; "lots of licks in between the chords", "stylistically similar to Steve Cropper". The chorus changes E–G–A are the ♭III and the IV again, clean this time; "Bold as Love" is the same hand's "chordal arpeggios and contrapuntal motion".^{[14] [29] [36] [9b]}

Rolling waltz (the Manic Depression way)

Three to the bar and three to the beat — the churning triplet feel Mitchell took from a jazz waltz — with the guitar and bass in unison on a riff that climbs to each chord's root by step and half-step, and a chromatic walk from the IV through the ♯IV to the V. The lead rolls in triplets from the pentatonic, alternate-picked, with ghost notes. The kit rolls: ride on every triplet, the snare on two, the kick on one and three.^{[12b] [22] [18]}

Fast blues shuffle (the Killing Floor way)

The blues he opened Monterey with: Howlin' Wolf's twelve bars "at a faster tempo, with a different rhythm guitar and bass line", and B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby" "speeded up considerably". The guitar is Hubert Sumlin's job made his own — the shuffle riff on the low strings under a thumb-over 7th chord at the 5th fret, the 5th, the 6th and the ♭7 reached by the pinky, "double-stops described as '6ths' over both the I and IV" and the melody "by taking the pinkie finger on and off", a walk into every change — and the lead is the box under the same hand at a tempo where the bends have to be quick. The band is a hard shuffle: kick on one and three, the snare cracking two and four, the hat swung, the bass walking root, 3rd, 5th, 6th. Earl King's "Come On" at "a faster tempo … a more rock feel" is the same hand in E.^{[39] [39b] [51] [49]}

Major ballad (the Angel way)

The other ballad: a major key, the Leslie turning, the same thumb barre walking up the neck with the changes — F at the 1st fret, C at the 8th, Gm7 at the 3rd, B♭ at the 6th, E♭ at the 11th — and the colors a major chord takes: the maj7 inside the E shape on the D string (the C shape's "major-7 colors"), the 9th hammered on the top string, the 4th onto the 3rd, the 6th onto the 5th, 4ths slid on the top two strings. "Angel" runs I–V–ii7–IV–♭VII by the analysis site, its intro I7 and IV(add9), "arguably Jimi's finest ballad"; Cox names "Drifting" as the Mayfield in him; "Have You Ever Been" has "chord patterns comparable to 'Little Wing'"; "May This Be Love" and "One Rainy Wish" are the others. The band is soft and straight — the rim click on two and four, the bass on long roots — and there is room.^{[40] [40b] [40c] [11] [7] [49]}

Country blues, acoustic (the Hear My Train way)

"100 percent country blues": one chord with breaks, andante (65 to 80), the thumb on the low E every beat the way Lightnin' Hopkins and Lead Belly did it and the fingers answering on the top strings between the vocal lines — the ♭3 hammered to the 3rd, the ♭7 on the B string, the open E and its octave, a slide up the G string, a pull-off to the open string — and in the breaks "highly charged guitar soloing and accompaniment"; Fairchild hears Tommy Johnson's 1928 "Big Fat Mama"; McErlain hears Lightnin' Hopkins in the riff and a bend "behind the nut" that "tweaks the third". The film performance is a 1960 Zemaitis twelve-string "tuned down two tones to C standard for that deep, Lead Belly-style blues box tone"; the feel is written in E at the nut for a six-string in standard tuning. No band but a foot: the kick soft on one and three. "Belly Button Window" is the other solo blues.^{[41] [41b] [41c] [34] [49]}

Riff rock at speed (the Fire way)

The fast side of the R&B: "a duet between Hendrix and his drummer", "soul, psychedelic rock, and polyrhythmic jazz-inspired drumming" (AllMusic on "Fire"), a riff on the low strings in the minor pentatonic doubled at the octave — "an octave effect" — under thumb-over barre chords whose top two strings the picking hand mutes, the ♭VII beside the I ("chords transition from D to C"), the 7♯9 as the stab on "Crosstown Traffic", "harmonic notes" plucked to open "Stone Free" — whose verse is "the beginning eight bars of a twelve-bar blues" with the cowbell in quarters and a bass "similar to a rhythm guitar" — and the Wes Montgomery octave line of "Third Stone" in the same hand. Straight eighths at 150, the kick busy, the snare hard, ghost notes in the hat. "Gypsy Eyes", "Ezy Ryder", "Highway Chile" are the riff side of the funk.^{[42] [42b] [44] [43] [49] [50]}

Minor rock strum (the Watchtower way)

The cover he made his own: three chords, C♯m–B–A–B, the C♯m "often voiced as C♯m7 to free the pinky", strummed on Dave Mason's twelve-string "down-down-up-up-down-up" with the chords left "to breathe and ring out rather than constantly strumming", the pickup "on the 'and' of 3" into the change, and over it the lead — the slide up the neck into the box, whole-tone bends with a "floaty" vibrato, unison bends, the wah for a chorus, "the C♯ minor blues scale at the 9th with Dorian notes". Zak: "three basic strategies" — the gestures intensified, dissonance let in, "a long-range, goal-directed melodic line". The band is a straight backbeat with the bass on roots; the vibraslap's dry rattle is the hat's job here.^{[47] [47b] [15d]}

Jazz shuffle with the wah (the Up from the Skies way)

"A breezy, jazz-based stroll" with "an easy triplet jazz feel", Mitchell on brushes, "delicate wah-wah" on the guitar "throughout the entire song", and the chords the tab pages give — B9, F♯7, C9, C♯7 — the 9th grip with the root on the A string slid in from a fret below and moved by a fret, the way a jazz-blues comp moves; "a step back into blues of the mid-fifties but with some contemporary guitar antics." The comp is light and on the shuffle's upbeats with the pedal opening on each; the lead is the Mixolydian with the ♭3 and the chromatic step let in, the wah rocked with the phrase. The bass walks in quarters; the brushes swish. "Rainy Day, Dream Away" and "Still Raining, Still Dreaming" are its cousins.^{[45] [45b] [45c] [50]}

One-chord slow blues (the Voodoo Chile way)

The fifteen-minute blues: "Catfish Blues" — his Muddy Waters homage, verses from "Rollin' Stone" and "Still a Fool" — grown into "a slow and menacing blues jam" on one chord, "virtually a chronological guided tour of blues styles" from the Delta to Coltrane (Charles Shaar Murray), opening with "a series of hammer-on notes similar to Albert Collins' 'Collins Shuffle'", the guitar tuned down a whole tone through a Fender Bassman "very warm", Winwood's "modal, raga-like phrase" answered with "a mixed blues/eastern scale", and "plotted and planned" (Eddie Kramer) for all its looseness. The riff is the form: the open E, the ♭3 hammered to the 3rd, the 4th, the ♭5, the 5th, the ♭7 and the octave on the low strings in 12/8, answered on the top strings; the lead is the box at the 12th over the drone. The band lays back: ride on every triplet, the kick on one and three, the bass on the riff. The electric "Hear My Train" grew into the same thing.^{[46] [46b] [41] [50]}

6. The songs, as reference points — and the catalog by album

What happens in each record, with its key as fingered, its form and the devices to listen for — and where to find a tab of it (Ultimate Guitar and Songsterr are linked; the tab is theirs, the analysis is here). The parts on this page draw on the way of playing in each; none copies its lines. Chord progressions are common stock — the US Copyright Office's practice and the Second Circuit in the Ed Sheeran case both leave them outside copyright^{[30] [30b]} — so the changes are given as they are, and are in the Jam tab's preset list under Hendrix.

The catalog by album

Every song of his a source describes, album by album, with the style the source gives it and the feel of this course that covers the way of playing. A song no source describes is marked so: the tools that made this page cannot listen, so a style is only claimed where it was read, and where a line says "by the reader, not the sources" it says so. Counted, the sources describe fifteen ways of playing on these records — the eight the first version of this course had, and seven added for the sides the catalog turned up. The free-form sound painting ("Third Stone", "1983", "EXP", the anthem at Woodstock) and the studio pieces (backwards guitar, the harpsichord) are named and not covered: a band cannot hold them and a tab cannot say them.^{[49] [48]}

7. Studies

Whole forms to play through: the presets from the Jam tab's Hendrix list, with a part from the library realized over them, its fills and lead lines rolled once and fixed — the same tab every time, the one the review read. Not the songs — the app's own writing over the forms the music runs on. The last lesson of the course leaves the fill bars of these to you.

8. For teachers

What each lesson is for, what goes wrong first, and how to tell when it is learned. The lessons are the ones in Start here; each names its cards, and every card folds its own fingering and troubleshooting under it. Every fingering on this page says whether the sources describe it or it is the usual way (the tag under each grip), and every claim about the records is cited; the playing itself was never heard by the author (see How this was made), so treat the tab as an account of the idiom, not a transcription.

Common faults, and how to hear them

When it is learned

• The thumb bass and the split chord steady at the practice tempo for eight bars, then at the record's tempo, on Em, G, Am and Bm without looking.
• The hammered 4th, 6th and 9th clean on any thumb-over chord, and the 4th on the A shape.
• Sliding 6ths through a I–IV–V in two keys, the slide landing on the beat.
• The 7♯9 struck with only its four notes sounding, and the riff under it in time with a bass line.
• The E minor pentatonic box at the 12th up and down at four notes a beat, then the same box at the nut connected to the box above it.
• The 4th bent to the 5th in pitch, and a step-and-a-half from the 4th to the 6th, each with vibrato only after arrival.
• The 9th grip slid in on beat three of a 12/8 bar, the trill inside the triplet.
• The wah scratch for four bars without the strings ringing, the chord landing on the "and of 2".
• The walk-up round the cycle of fourths, each 5th becoming the next root, at 82.
• The shuffle riff under the thumb-over A7 at 150, muted, the pinky on the ♭7, and the walk into every change.
• The thumb barre with the maj7 said and let go and the 9th hammered on top, walking F, C, Gm7, B♭, E♭ at 64 without a late chord.
• The thumb on the low E through eight bars of the country blues with two answers a bar from the fingers, alone with the foot.
• The octave riff under the thumb chord at 150, two notes in every octave, muted between.
• The strum that breathes through C♯m7, B, A, B at 112, the "and of 3" ringing and the pickup early into every change.
• The wah comp on B9, C9, C♯9 and F♯13 slid in on one with the pedal, under the bass, at 126.
• The Catfish riff in the triplet at 56 with the hammered 3rd and the ♭5 passed through, and an answer of your own on the top strings.
• Any study on this page played through twice at its tempo with the band.

9. How this was made

What was done, and what was not. This page and the Hendrix genre in the app were written by Claude (an AI model, working in Claude Code) at the owner's request, in September 2026 — first as eight feels and eight lessons, then rebuilt on 2026-09-13 to the method written down for the Stevie Ray Vaughan course (docs/COURSES.md) and widened to every side of him the records show (docs/HENDRIX-RESEARCH.md). The research was reading: the sources in the list below were fetched and read as text — a Gresham College lecture transcript, the abstract and description of a University of Washington dissertation, a London College of Music analysis, a university lesson on Steve Cropper, course pages from Berklee and Ohio State, the Wikipedia articles on the songs, the albums and the 7♯9 chord, magazine and web lessons (Guitar Player's five rules whole, Guitar World's rhythm, R&B and phrasing lessons and its Roger Mayer interview, Premier Guitar, MusicRadar, Happy Bluesman, Blackstar, Pickup Music, Jon MacLennan's Hey Joe, Purple Haze, Wind Cries Mary, Watchtower and Killing Floor lessons, guitarclub.io, Riff Ninja, Guitar Control, Texas Blues Alley, JustinGuitar, LickLibrary, Guitarforce, TrueFire, Active Melody), interviews with Billy Cox, Mitch Mitchell (as quoted), Eddie Kramer and Roger Mayer, a 1967 interview with Hendrix, the tempo and chord sites, and the legal sources on chord progressions; several of the magazine pages refused the tools and were read through a text-extraction proxy. No recordings were listened to and no videos were watched: the tools used cannot play audio or video, so the video lessons the course links are named by their titles and not relied on. Several pages could not be read — Hooktheory's analyses and some tab pages render only in a browser, the dissertation's full text had no extractable text layer — and where a fact came only from a search engine's summary of such a page, the source list says so. The rest is the model's own knowledge of the music, checked against the sources where they overlap.

The parts were then written the way every part in this app is written (docs/STYLES.md): from the idiom — where the weight falls, which strings, which notes, how a phrase ends — never from a transcription, and with no signature riff of his reproduced; the split chord, the walk-up, the shuffle riff, the octave riff, the strum pattern, the Catfish form and the 9th comp are the common property of the music. Each part is a figure with variants, fills that know whether the next bar changes, lead lines, and a beginner's version, in the interval notation the engine realizes into notes on the neck; the engine gained what the first version's parts needed — free (chromatic) notes, a reach past the position, the blues palette over major chords, the 7♯9 and 9th grips, the split chord, unison bends, trills, the wah — and the rebuild needed nothing new of it: the thumb chord, the harmonics, the fingerpicked thumb, the named grips were already there from the other courses, and each is held by a test. The data of this page has no DOM in it (js/hendrix-guide-data.js), so node tools/dive-check.js hendrix --print realizes every card exactly as the page does and prints every bar as strings and frets, and the rebuild read every one of them against the research before the page was drawn: the review found the major ballad's maj7 written free and so sounding a major 7th over the m7 chord, the jazz shuffle's lead losing its ♭7 to the pentatonic reading, the blues boxes drawn from a seven-note pattern, a scale box a fret wider than its window, the fast shuffle's changes card empty where its part played the riff alone, and the old ballad study's window not walking with the chords — every one invisible in the code and plain in the printout, and every one fixed before the page was drawn. The tabs are realizations of those parts, rolled from a fixed seed so the page reads the same each time; the changes, the exercises and the studies are fixed outright; the sound is the app's own recorded guitar and synthesized band. Tempos are approximate; keys are the fingered keys. Where the page says "the Angel way" or "the Fire way", it means the way of playing on that record, not its notes.

10. Sources

Numbered as cited above; the first thirty-three are the first version's, 34 on were read for the rebuild. "Read" means the page was fetched and read as text; "summary" means only a search engine's summary of the page could be read; "through a reader proxy" means the page refused the tools directly and was read through a text-extraction service; "linked" means the page is given for the reader and was not readable by the tools.