Jimi Hendrix’s solo in “Hey Joe” is a lesson in how to play ‘greasy’ – the style where articulation effects with exaggerated emotion take precedence. Many of the essential blues rock techniques are used and they’re delivered in a hot and heavy style, often in combination or one right after the other. You can learn a ton by mastering this solo and its techniques!
The solo begins with a whole step bend capped by vibrato. This is one of the hardest techniques to master, but you’ve got to give it a go. That portion of the lick is followed by a descending run that includes a third finger bend and release followed by a pull-off. Jimi probably adapted this lick from Guitar Slim’s "The Story of My Life" (see video below) adding a bit of Hubert Sumlin’s “Spoonful” vibrato upfront.
You can see a ‘how to’ video for the bend with vibrato from my blog here. Essentially, you’ve got to bend the D at the fifteenth fret up a whole step and add vibrato. I recommend copying the sound of other great player’s vibrato of this type. This is a good place to start.
A clean, strong pull-off is absolutely essential to getting the bend and release plus pull-off lick in the first line of the solo. OK, so we’re only seven notes into the solo – still with me? The term pull-off is somewhat misleading. Many people try to execute this move by pulling the finger up and away from the string. This will only serve to mute the next note. You have to pull the finger down, actually squeezing the string almost into the fretboard, and then circle back to be prepared for the next note. It’s good to practice doing them VERY slowly. Think of it as plucking the string with your left hand finger – you should be able to make a sound without picking.
The solo makes abundant use of first finger vibrato. This unique vibrato is done by rotating the fretting hand wrist without moving the forearm laterally and keeping the elbow in a fixed position. The hand swings down and back with the index finger pulling and releasing the string very slightly, only a millimeter or two. BB King is the master of this technique but you can see me doing it on all the first finger vibrato notes in the video (always a G or G/B double stop at the twelfth fret).
All of these techniques are used in just the first line. You can see how the term ‘greasy’ applies. If we jump down to line five, we see that it closes with a whole step bend that ends staccato or short but then jumps to a first finger vibrato on G at the twelfth fret. The key here is to learn to do each articulation technique, and then put them into action with real music. This solo provides a major opportunity that will point you towards what needs to be learned and whether or not you’ve gotten it down. Just break it into component parts and then put them back together.
When I started my blog in 2015, my first post was an analysis of Jimi’s “Hey Joe” solo, from the perspective of melodic structure and phrasing, and I recommend that you take a look at it if you’re interested in learning the solo. I could discuss Jimi forever and in fact I wrote my master’s thesis about him. There is still more to discuss about today’s topic but most important of all is to shed it and don’t give up. It is one of those unusual compositions that’s accessible to an intermediate player yet will keep advanced players on their toes. It’s the perfect vehicle to take you from one stage to the next. -Chris Botta
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