Here’s a version of an old favourite of mine by Jimi Hendrix, arranged for acoustic guitar(s).
A great regret of mine is that I was born too late to witness the force of nature that was Jimi Hendrix. By the time I started school he was gone. It wasn’t until the early 80s, as I was starting to get to grips with the guitar, that I discovered him. At the time, the charts were full of synth bands, so I looked back in time for inspiration and discovered the likes of Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and King Crimson as well as Hendrix.
One of his most famous songs is Purple Haze and I’m playing it here in a two guitar arrangement.
The rhythm part is in drop D tuning – I’ve based this on the bass line, as well as using some power chords at times. The tuning allows me to get the low D notes and power chord in the solo section.
The melodic part is in standard tuning and, here, I make use of chords and vocal line in the verse. For the solo, I’ve transposed the whole thing down an octave and use slides mainly instead of bends. Hendrix was a master of expressive string bending, which I suppose is technically possible on an acoustic, but I find slides work much better.
The videoing side of this is obviously quite new to me – apologies for my cinematographic limitations! But it was a lot of fun playing this. Hope you like it.