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.