5 Levels of "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix

[Music] so [Music] so [Music] hello internet my name is ayla tesler mabe and today i'd like to share with you the process that helped young ayla attempt to play like one of her musical heroes jimi hendrix so jimmy is known for his ability to seamlessly and effortlessly play both rhythm and lead guitar at the same time which was quite necessary since he was almost always playing in situations where he was the only guitarist the fullness and the freedom of the sound he was able to generate was so inspiring to me as a young player that i needed to figure out what he was doing in this lesson i'll take you through five levels of how you could approach playing in this hendrixion style and we'll do that with his iconic version of hey joe so just stating the obvious here no matter how much anyone tries no one will truly be able to sound like jimmy play like jimmy anything but we can definitely try our best to learn from such a masterful and innovative player there are so many nuances to trying to play like jimmy that i honestly think it could be a lifelong journey to try to adopt even some of the key elements of his style and i don't think you necessarily need to be able to master every single part of every level before progressing to the next one but i thought it could be helpful to give a bit of structure to this learning process by giving you levels to follow and i'm going to throw a whole pile of information at you and hopefully some of the details will stick anyways here we go so level one i'm gonna show you an approach that even a beginner could hopefully use to get through the whole song just looking at open chords and the chords that jimmy uses in this song are as follows we're going to start with c major g major [Music] d major a major to e major and of course these are the same changes found in the original version of the song written by billy roberts so now that we know the open chords let's talk a little bit about how long you hold each chord for so we have one two three four one two three four one two three four one two three four so my guitar being slightly out of tune aside basically you're playing the c major chord for two beats g major for two beats d major for two beats a major for two beats and then e for four and then you played again for four and that is the structure of the chord progression so moving on to the second level of hey joe is incorporating bar chords instead of open chords and it'll be easier to build to the next levels if you are able to use bar chords and it'll also give you the ability to unlock more variety in your chord voicings if you want to utilize both open and bar chords when you play because if you watch versions of jimmy playing this live you actually see him moving pretty freely between open chords and you know some other chord shapes as well so firstly instead of playing c major as an open chord you could play it as a bar chord here and there are of course a few different voicings you could use uh personally this is my approach where i'm barring with my index finger and my ring finger and i kind of avoid the high e string altogether and of course this will also work for the d major chord [Music] now i think the most important chord to see if you can learn especially if you like jimi hendrix is this version of a major chord because of course you could play this g major chord as a full on bar chord like this you almost never saw jimmy play this chord shape instead he would play major chords like this with the thumb wrapping around to play the root note muting the a string so ideally nothing's ringing up ring finger in this case on the fifth fret of the d string [Music] middle finger on the fourth fret of the g string and then your index finger playing the third fret of the b string and ideally barring so that you can also cover the third fret of the high e string now of course this chord shape also works [Music] for the a major now instead of playing r open e like this of course you could take this major chord shape all the way up here up the octave i really want it though i personally don't hear him play that voicing in the song just putting it out there that is an option but you could definitely play e here at the seventh fret of the a string with that bar chord shape and it might be cool to move freely between you know your open e and then e up the octave here just because it could give you another voicing to raise the energy of the song of it now one of the best parts of being able to approach major chords in this way is really easily being able to turn it into an add 9 chord by adding your pinky up on the high e string in this case if you're playing g major it would be the fifth fret and if you're playing that a major chord your pinky would be up here on the seventh fret of the high e string to turn it into an a add and you definitely hear him using this chord voicing in the song so let's say i threw in some of these new chord voicings your chord progression could turn into something like this [Music] so that's fun i think it's a great starting place to you know work on these chord voicings to give you lots of options and freedom but obviously there's a lot missing from what we're playing so far and a lot of the magic is going to come from our next level let's move on to the next level so of course so far we've been playing the chords and simply holding them like this that's great but it's time to really get that strumming hand involved and if you watch videos of jimmy playing not just this song but a lot of his songs there's so much movement and i think you know a lot of that comes from his r b guitar playing roots which is so groove based and it can be pretty difficult to get the style of playing down but it's so worth working on because it could turn your playing into something like this [Music] so what am i doing [Music] to start let's break the chord up so that you're playing the root note twice and then strumming the rest of the chord [Music] you can apply this to all of the chords you play now let's add a little extra something if you can get this groove down it'll make everything that you add to you're playing in this song makes so much more sense everything is in this field so what i'm doing is as soon as i play a chord i'm releasing pressure so that i can get some muted strums in there so regardless of what i'm doing with my fretting hand this strumming hand is always moving [Music] and this is exactly how jimmy was able to keep his rhythm groove going while playing lead there was always some sort of groove going on underneath everything that he played and to take things to the next level even further he would also incorporate this strumming pattern into the song [Music] so to remove you know the chords and everything it's basically this [Music] and i think when you're learning strumming patterns like this the best thing you can do is kind of listen to it over and over again and see if you could even tap it out or sing it and then i'm actually thinking that while i'm playing it and it helps me keep that rhythm going and one thing you'll notice me doing is when i play with g major chord i'm playing a regular g major and then i'm turning it into a g add9 because you definitely hear him doing that in the song and something that i haven't pointed out yet when you listen to the original studio recording of hey joe you have this rhythm part panned over to the left and then you have the lead part panned over to the right and the rhythm part has this groove going on that i'm teaching you now and yeah that's the groove again you could isolate just looking at your strumming hand ignoring the chords start incorporating the chord slowly it can take a while to get the style of playing down but it's definitely essential to jimi hendrix style playing so now that we've really focused on building that rhythm guitar groove foundation let's start adding some lead guitar sensibilities to what you're playing and we're going to start with some simple connecting lines to start incorporating melody into the groove and this is what it could sound like [Music] so the most important one to point out this is one of the first lines that i learned when i was learning this song and i played it over and over again because i didn't know how to do anything else but it really got the job done and so when you play that g chord [Music] to come up to the d chord that follows it you end up sliding from the fifth fret to the seventh fret on the low e string and then you land on the fifth fret of the a string which happens to be the root note of d major which works perfectly and then that can serve as the beginning of the groove you know when you're playing that d major chord [Music] and then as you're coming down to the e major you could add a little bend here on the third fret of the low e string and this isn't necessarily a huge staple of jimmy's playing in the studio version of hey joe but there's a lot of blues influence of course in his playing delta blues influence um and that's to me a very delta blues type of thing to do and so i think it could be a great line to incorporate and so putting it all together slowly this is what you could end up with [Music] something i just added there feel free to slide down on the low e string because it sounds cool because basically the point i want to make here is no matter what melody you're adding with your fretting hand that groove is constantly going but that kind of gives you the ability sometimes to [Music] do weird almost nonsensical things but as long as it's in the groove and in the pocket it kind of works anything kind of goes as long as you don't lose that group and that's something kind of fun to take note of when you're watching jimmy play live the groove is always going sometimes he's doing really strange sounding things with his fretting hand but it totally works and again it's because of that constant groove so for this last level i'm just going to throw a bunch of ideas your way stuff that i lifted from the song and hopefully these ideas will become a lot more applicable and sound and feel more authentic now that we've gone through the other four levels but of course even if you haven't mastered some of the other stuff we've looked at you still might be able to incorporate some of these ideas and then you can work your way up to you know having the whole foundation solid you're on your own journey and that's all good so the first idea i want to show you is this [Music] so this is a very iconic line that you hear a lot in this song [Music] and again it's at the end of the progression once we land on that e major chord [Music] what you're doing is sliding up from the fifth fret to the seventh fret [Music] and then you're playing the fifth fret of the a string with a little bit of a bend on it and on the seventh fret again and then you play the fifth fret of the d string again you want to add a little of a bend on it if you can [Music] land on that seventh fret of the a string lots of vibrato and it's pretty aggressive in in the attack with your picking hand [Music] but sounds pretty cool i think it's a huge staple of the song moving on to the next line [Music] this is a lick that you definitely hear in the song if you listen closely and you start by sliding from the second fret to the fourth fret on the g string immediately landing with your index finger on the third fret of the b string and then you reach up and play the fifth fret of the b string which you could in theory do with your ring finger but personally i find it more comfortable to do with my pinky i don't know why but anyways basically what you want to hear is second fret pardon me fourth fret second fret open on the g string but it sounds to me like he actually slides down the whole time and it's a little tricky to get the timing down when you're sliding like that because you want to hear these notes articulated with this rhythm but stylistically you want a slide to get it sounding authentic so basically when you're on that e chord you can do pretty much anything in e minor or e major pentatonic and pretty much all of the lines that jimmy throws in at that point come from mostly minor pentatonic and that's just a hint for you if you're familiar with that scale you can kind of play around [Music] and do whatever you want all that kind of stuff but yeah the authentic jimmy line something like that so the next slide is another lick that jimmy throws in on that e chord this actually comes in a little later in the song and it sounds like this [Music] and this is in e minor pentatonic this time all the way up here at the 12th fret barring across the 12th fret of the g string and b string landing on the 14th fret of the d string and you play that twice [Music] and you definitely want to slide off at the end of the frizz uh it's kind of a higher energy lick could be a cool one to throw in as the song has built up to a higher place emotionally and yeah that's another great one so this next line is actually played by the lead guitar that's panned over to the right but of course you can incorporate both of the parts and this is what it sounds like [Music] and the timing of where it sits in the phrase is a little weird uh you don't necessarily have to play it there but long story short you're up here in e minor pentatonic you play 12 14 on the a string and you do this trill on the 12th fret and the 14th fret of the d string and it's totally okay to catch the 12th fret of the g-string in there too [Music] you don't have to though but even if it's subtle it might add a little extra you know body to the lick but that's another great one to throw in now let's talk a little bit more about what you could do on other chords so this is something fun you can do on the d major chord sounds like [Music] [Applause] this so instead of simply playing that d major chord i played [Music] this fun lick it comes in on the offbeat uh and what you're doing is playing this triad here on the seventh fret of the d g and b strings slide down to the fifth fret and then you land in something like this kind of triad here with the third finger on the fifth fret of the d string middle finger on the fourth fret of the g string [Music] and your index finger on the third fret of the b string [Music] and then you land on a major the next line you can incorporate sounds like this [Music] so this is a lick that i actually picked up from jimmy's performance at berkeley as opposed to the studio recording but this is one of my favorite things to do on a major chord [Music] for example when you're on g major you start by playing the fifth fret of the g string and the fifth fret of the high e string you wanna prevent the b string from ringing out in this case and then you slide up to the seventh fret [Music] and even though in the recording i don't hear him doing that same kind of like on the a mage record you totally can long story short you can use this on any major chord and it's a really nice r b style fill to add let's go back to something interesting you could add to the e major chord when you land on it [Music] and again this is a super subtle thing that you hear him do in the rhythm guitar part but it's pretty cool and basically what i'm doing is my e major chord i'm playing an e triad here on the ninth fret of the d g and b strings and then i'm sliding that down to the seventh fret and back up to the ninth fret and then you play something like seven to nine on the d string and it's totally okay to bar with that index finger there because then you can get that seventh fret of the g string in there too if you want and then you play 11 and you slide down [Music] and something else that's cool to note when he plays this line when he gets that he majored [Music] he's actually pretty active with the strumming [Music] so that when he adds that next line there's already a lot of movement going on and it just fits perfectly so again the whole line could sound like this [Music] so the last line which is probably the most used in the song when you really listen sounds like this [Music] and it's replacing that d major chord and you play the fifth fret of the a string slide up to the seventh fret you don't have to slide but there's a subtle slide there slide up to the ninth fret and back to the seventh fret and then immediately land in the a chord [Music] or you could do something crazy [Music] and land you know in an a major bar chord shape where this note's actually included just because then you know you're landing right in a chord and there's a little bit of harmony to that last note but either way this is what it could sound like [Music] so that was the fifth and final lesson of how you could approach playing hey joe because to me the ultimate jimi hendrix style is complete freedom on the instrument and it's never just about playing chords or just about playing lead it's about being so connected to the groove that you're just constantly playing freely i don't even know how to describe it it almost transcends lead and rhythm it just is like the whole song hopefully you can learn some of those lines um and incorporate them into your playing i'm just trying to think of a lesson that young ayla would have really taken some value from as i was trying to upgrade my hey joe play and i hope that you learned a little something from this so i hope that you enjoyed this lesson and have a little bit of a deeper understanding and insight into jimi hendrix's legendary guitar style and he and his music were and continued to be such a huge influence on my musical journey as a musician and artist and i hope that i've given you some tricks to take your playing to the next level and with that i will see you soon

Channel: Musora

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Keywords: jimi hendrix, justin guitar jimi hendrix, how to play hey joe, hey joe guitar lesson, how to play hey joe on guitar, hey joe guitar lesson beginner, hey joe guitar lesson solo, hey joe guitar lesson chords, hey joe guitar lesson acoustic, hey joe guitar lesson easy, how to play hey joe like hendrix, how to play hey joe on guitar with tabs, how to play hey joe solo on guitar, how to play hey joe on guitar solo, hey joe jimi hendrix justinguitar, hey joe guitar lesson with tabs

Id: s3b96zhjTCI

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022