Simplicity done well is the theme of this series. There are some very effective techniques and approaches to be gleaned from the 4 days that U2 spent at Sun Studios in October 1987.

“All Along the Watchtower” uses a short repeating progression, but Hendrix turns it into an arrangement of colour and intensity.

This lesson explores how rhythm, dynamics, texture and tone can create contrast when the underlying harmony remains largely unchanged. We will also examine how the guitar parts support the song before stepping forward into the spotlight.

This is the middle chapter of our 3 song series and one that delves in to arrangement and orchestration (in this case guitar effects). It demonstrates something beyond technique: arrangement as interpretation. Hendrix takes an extraordinarily spare Dylan song and constructs an escalating dramatic architecture around essentially the same repeating harmonic material. There are many songs out there that have the same repeating pattern for 4-5mins with no variation. The approach here can be repurposed for other similiar songs.

Bob Dylan recorded All Along the Watchtower for John Wesley Harding, released in 1967. The song itself is unusually compressed: three verses, no conventional chorus, and a cyclical harmonic structure. Even the narrative / lyrics are strange, with the first two verses are dialogue between the joker and thief, while the final verse suddenly gives us the watchtower, approaching riders and gathering storm. 

Dylan's recording matches that economy. Hendrix heard the album very soon after its release. Dave Mason recalled listening to an advance copy with Hendrix; Watchtower immediately caught Hendrix's attention, and within days they were recording it at Olympic Studios in London on January 21, 1968.

And this is important for how we approach the transformation theme. Hendrix doesn't alter Dylan by reharmonising the song into something vastly more complicated. He recognises the dramatic possibilities inside the repetition.

The basic Hendrix arrangement

The Hendrix recording is centred on C♯ minor, with the recurring progression essentially moving:

C♯m – B – A – B

So there isn't a verse progression followed by a harmonically contrasting chorus followed by another progression for the solo. We can think of this as vi-V-IV-V in the key of E.

The same cycle keeps returning. That presents an interesting arranging problem:

How do you make approximately four minutes of music continually intensify when the harmony barely changes?

Hendrix's answer is orchestration. The guitar becomes several different instruments over the course of the record. The underlying track itself is revealing. Hendrix initially played six-string acoustic guitar, Dave Mason played 12-string acoustic and Mitch Mitchell played drums. Hendrix subsequently played the bass himself and built electric guitar layers over that foundation. The Engineer/Producer Kramer describes the finished recording as evolving in successive layers, beginning in London and continuing with overdubs in New York. The video below is the live version, but this can be heard on the official album version.

So when you hear the giant electric-guitar part, you should first notice that underneath it is an acoustic rhythmic engine. This can work as a good arrangement with another guitarist or with a looper pedal.

The opening immediately announces the guitar as the dramatic voice. He effectively starts with a solo-style intro. The vocal enters, and the guitar largely becomes an accompanist. Then, at carefully chosen points, it moves forward.  

This creates a structural alternation, something like:

Introduction → vocal → guitar statement → vocal → larger guitar statement → vocal → climactic guitar passage/outro.

I think it's a good approach to sketch out a song structure like this (as a kind of dynamic story) when you are dealing with a repetitive chord structure. The guitar therefore performs a function normally supplied by sections of a song. That's why I would hesitate to describe Watchtower simply as a song containing “a great guitar solo.” It's more of a succession of guitar episodes that are part of the arrangement.

And that makes the major solo entrance so effective

Hendrix doesn't merely begin soloing because sixteen bars have elapsed. He interrupts the song. He shatters it. The guitar arrives with a change of register, intensity, articulation and timbre. The listener experiences it almost like another character entering the narrative.

And importantly, Hendrix has earned that moment by withholding it.  Restraint → anticipation → entrance → escalation. That is arrangement.

The wah-wah is especially clever

The wah shouldn't be understood merely as an “effect that makes the guitar sound psychedelic.” For sure, it certainly went a long way to define this. (Check this out https://vimeo.com/200510512?fl=pl&fe=sh#t=16m53s)

A wah is essentially a movable resonant filter. Rocking the pedal changes the frequency area being emphasised. Hendrix could therefore make a sustained or bent note change its vowel-like quality while the pitch itself remains relatively stable:

oo → ah → ee

That makes the guitar extraordinarily vocal. In the link above, Kramer talks about how integrated Hendrix was in his use. This circles back to my previous comment about being in the record shop in Limerick, Ireland, and asking about this guitarist who could make the guitar talk. Whilst I now know I was referring to the talkbox (Framptone) that Peter Frampton used on Do you feel like we do, from his Frampton comes Alive album, evidently making the guitar talk was what related to the Wah pedal and Hendrix.

In Watchtower, the wah-drenched passages contrast with other guitar sounds Hendrix has already established. So again, it is arrangement through timbre. Instead of:

verse / chorus / bridge

Hendrix can create contrast through: cleaner guitar / distorted guitar / octave guitar / wah guitar / single-note guitar / double-stops / acoustic texture. The sound of the guitar becomes structural.

His phrasing is equally important

if wqe strip away the fuzz and wah and much of Hendrix's vocabulary is recognisably rooted in blues and pentatonic playing. But it's important to listen to the shape of the phrases. He doesn't just blaze through runs of the C♯ minor pentatonic continuously. You'll hear short statements, long sustained bends, bursts of faster notes, double-stops, octave figures and substantial changes in register. So you can a classic blue call and response structure:

short phrase → space → answer

then:

bend────────

then:

rapid phrase → resolution

then:

octave statement → repetition → intensification.

That is much closer to speech than scale practice. If we want to create our own phrasing and solos over the progression but still pay homage to Jimi then don't ask “what scale is Hendrix using?” Start with

Ask:

“What is this phrase doing?”

• Is it asking a question?
• Is it answering something?
• Is it increasing tension?
• Is it repeating an idea?
• Is it climbing?
• Is it landing?
• Is it leaving space?

That changes our attention from notes to rhetoric/or telling a story. B.B. King explains it beautifully here, https://youtu.be/Thja3cvEJWY?si=-3Gp7PQ_fRLesd6y&t=560 

The octave passage is a brilliant example

One of the memorable solo textures is Hendrix's use of octaves. Instead of suddenly introducing new harmonic material, he changes the density and register of the melodic material. A single-note line becomes a bigger octave sound. Then the wah changes its colour. Then bends and more conventional blues-rock vocabulary can take over.

Enjoy!

Well, she's walking through the clouds
With a circus mind that's running wild
Butterflies and zebras and moonbeams
And her fairy tales
That's all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind

This lesson introduces the chord-and-fill approach most closely associated with Hendrix. It is a beautiful study in voice leading, touch and economy: a small movement inside a chord can say as much as a long solo.

Focus: chord embellishments, double-stops, voice leading, melodic rhythm guitar and expressive touch.

Link: Learn “Little Wing”

Listen for the Conversation

Hendrix’s rhythm and lead playing rarely feel like separate jobs. A chord suggests a fill; a vocal phrase is answered by the guitar; a repeated progression changes character through touch, dynamics or tone.

As you work through these songs, listen for that conversation. Learn the parts, but also notice what makes them move, breathe and respond.

That is where the real Hendrix lesson begins.

Little Wing is probably the clearest example of what I mean by “chords that sing”, because Hendrix effectively dissolves the conventional boundary between rhythm guitar and lead guitar.

The intro: A useful way to learn it is not simply as a difficult intro to memorise, but as a system for turning harmony into melody.

The underlying harmony is relatively straightforward

IF we strip back Hendrix's embellishments, the familiar opening progression can be understood approximately as:

Em – G – Am – Em – Bm – B♭ – Am – C – G – F – C – D

What makes the recording extraordinary isn't primarily the chord sequence. It is what Hendrix does inside and between those chords.

A conventional guitarist might play:

Em | G | Am | Em

Hendrix treats those chord symbols more like harmonic locations. He arrives at Em, but while he is there he is free to move notes around it; he then uses those melodic movements to lead toward G, and does the same again on the way to Am.

So instead of:

CHORD → CHORD → CHORD

you get something more like:

chord → melody → chord → fill → chord → melody → next chord

And crucially, it doesn't sound like somebody playing rhythm guitar and occasionally stopping to insert a lick. The chord and the lick are one continuous musical gesture.

This is where the Hendrix chord vocabulary matters

A large part of the technique comes from Hendrix's use of partial chord shapes rather than six-string barre chords.

For example, instead of thinking of G major exclusively as:

3 5 5 4 3 3

you can think of the upper part of it as:

x x 5 4 3 3

Now several fingers become available to add and remove notes.

Similarly, Hendrix's famous thumb-over-the-neck technique allows the thumb to supply a bass/root note while the fingers remain available for embellishment.

That physical technique has a musical consequence: the fretting hand isn't trapped inside a chord shape.

The chord becomes a platform from which melodic events can happen.

Hammer-ons and pull-offs become harmony

This is particularly valuable for students who already know their pentatonic shapes.

Take a major chord and notice that the familiar minor-pentatonic/double-stop vocabulary is often sitting immediately around the chord shape.

Hendrix can therefore hold two notes of a chord while:

• hammering another note into the chord;
• pulling a note off;
• sliding a pair of notes into position;
• playing a double-stop;
• adding a suspended note and resolving it;
• briefly leaving the chord for a pentatonic phrase.

The distinction between “I'm playing a G chord” and “I'm playing a G-major lick” starts to become meaningless.

He's doing both.

And this is what I mean by voice leading

This would be a particularly worthwhile concept to introduce on your lesson page.

Suppose we reduce two chords to their constituent voices. Instead of thinking:

G → Am

think about what the individual notes are doing as the harmony changes.

A note might stay where it is. Another might move up a tone. Another might slide chromatically into its destination.

Hendrix exploits those little movements.

So students shouldn't only ask:

“What's the next chord?”

They can begin asking:

“How can I get from this chord to the next one melodically?”

That's voice leading viewed through a guitarist's hands.

And Little Wing is an exceptionally good vehicle for introducing it because you can actually see the voices moving around familiar chord shapes.

There's also a rhythmic lesson hidden in it

The notes alone don't produce the effect.

Hendrix doesn't continuously fill every available space. He alternates between chord attacks, sustained notes, embellishments, rests and little melodic responses.

That creates something very close to call and response.

You might hear:

Chord statement → answer

then:

Chord statement → different answer

then perhaps:

melodic approach → next chord

This connects directly with Hendrix's R&B background. Before becoming a star, he spent years playing as a sideman in the American R&B circuit. The guitar's job in that environment wasn't necessarily “strum chords until it's time for your solo.” Guitar parts could answer singers, reinforce horn figures, punctuate the groove and fill spaces.

In Hendrix's mature playing, that rhythm-guitar vocabulary becomes extraordinarily fluid.

Why this makes Little Wing such a strong third lesson

It now gives you a rather elegant pedagogical progression across the three songs:

Hey Joe — Follow the harmony

Learn a progression, hear the tonal centre, use pentatonic vocabulary and start targeting the changing chords.

↓

All Along the Watchtower — Transform the arrangement

Take a small amount of harmonic material and learn how dynamics, texture, register, rhythm and lead guitar can continually reinvent it.

↓

Little Wing — Erase the boundary

Stop thinking of harmony, rhythm and melody as three separate guitar functions. A chord can contain melody; a melodic phrase can imply harmony; and rhythm determines how the two converse.

That's actually a stronger overarching theme for your learning pathway than simply “learning three Hendrix songs.”

The endpoint becomes: Hendrix teaches us that rhythm, harmony and melody don't have to be separate activities on the guitar.

And that makes your heading “Chords That Sing” quite literal. The advanced lesson isn't learning all the decorations in the Little Wing intro note-for-note. It's learning why those decorations work, and then being able to make a different chord progression sing in the same way.