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hey, welcome to 12tone! it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that Jimi Hendrix
reinvented the electric guitar.
I mean, sure, the instrument had been around for years before Hendrix was even born, but
the way he used it was revolutionary.
from his pioneering use of effect pedals to his wild playing technique, Hendrix redefined
what the electric guitar could be, and while covering all his contributions would take
way more than one video, today I wanted to look at a technique so associated with him
that, to this day, we still call it the Hendrix chord.
(bang) it's a central part of songs like Purple Haze, Foxey Lady, and other classic Hendrix
pieces, and it's a perfect fit for the sound he was trying to create, but… why?
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
now, before we get started, a quick acknowledgment: Hendrix wasn't the first person to use this
particular chord.
jazz players had been using something like it for decades, and in rock, the Beatles had
already used it in Taxman a couple years before The Jimi Hendrix Experience's debut album,
but it was Hendrix's commitment to the chord as a key structural component of his harmonic
language that really propelled it into the spotlight. with that out of the way, it sounds
like this.
(bang) now, normally, I use a piano for my musical examples, but if I do that here, (bang)
it's just not quite right.
that's because the Hendrix chord is more than just a collection of notes: it's a specific
sound, and that sound requires a distorted electric guitar.
without that, sure, it still sounds cool, but it doesn't sound Hendrix.
why not?
well, I think that largely comes down to how distortion works.
the exact mechanics are a little complicated, but the important thing is that, if you play
more than one note at once through a distortion effect, the different signals interact and
you wind up adding a bunch of brand new frequencies to your final sound through a process called
intermodulation distortion.
it's not particularly noticeable if the notes are a fairly consonant interval apart, like
an octave or a perfect 5th, but as the chord gets more complex, the intermodulation effect
gets crunchier.
this is part of why many heavily-distorted styles like metal lean towards very simple
chord shapes like the power chord, but Hendrix chose to go in a different direction: the
Hendrix chord has some pretty dissonant intervals in it, so while he's only actually playing
these four notes, the soundscape it creates is full of all sorts of extra intermodulated
frequencies.
translating that to an instrument without distortion just doesn't feel the same.
despite that, though, the chord is still basically defined by the notes he's actually playing.
like many complex chords, this one gets fancier as we go up in register, so let's start at
the bottom, where the most fundamental notes are, and look at what each one is doing.
the lowest note here is an E, which is just the root of the chord.
it doesn't really have a specific job, it's just there to contextualize everything else.
it's super important, but also kinda boring on its own, so let's move on.
next, we add a G#, creating what's called a major dyad, which is a fancy way of saying
it's a major third but played as a chord. this gives us our basic tonality: the major
dyad implies a major triad, so we can treat this as being effectively E major, even though
we don't have a B yet.
I mean, we're never gonna have a B, Hendrix doesn't play a B here, but we're only two
notes in so shh, no spoilers.
anyway, the next note up is a D, and this is where things start to get interesting.
combined with the previous notes, this gives us a dominant 7th chord. or, rather, it gives
us what's called a shell voicing, which is when you just play the root, 3rd, and 7th.
in most chords, the 5th is almost always perfect, which means you can usually leave it out and
the audience will just kind of assume it's there, so shell voicings are a way to strip
the chord down to just the notes you actually need in order to imply that specific harmony.
again, we're pretending there's a B here even though no one's actually playing it.
so now we have a dominant 7th, which in traditional functional harmony, means we're trying to
point somewhere.
in the case of E7, we're probably pointing to some sort of A, because E7 is the V chord
in that key.
but Hendrix doesn't use it as a V chord: for the most part, when he plays the Hendrix chord,
it's built on the root of the key, making it the I chord, and it's rarely followed by
A. this means we're probably not using functional harmony at all: instead we're borrowing from
the blues tradition, which uses dominant 7ths not for their directionality but for their
bite.
the blues dominant 7th is kind of like a hybrid chord, combining the brightness of the major
3rd and the darkness of the minor 7th into one chord that kinda feels like it's fighting
itself, an effect that's amplified by the dissonant tritone between the two intervals.
and remember, dissonance through distortion results in colorful bonus frequencies.
but so far we've just built a dominant 7th chord.
sure, it's cool and bluesy, but we already have a name for it.
we've had that name for centuries.
the reason the Hendrix chord gets to be its own thing is because of the last note, G.
or maybe F double-sharp.
whatever.
this is the note that really brings the spice to this chord voicing, and there's a couple
different ways to explain how.
the first way to look at it is as what's called an altered chord, which just means it's built
from the altered scale, which is not, by itself a very helpful description, so let's talk
about what that actually means.
the altered scale is what you get when you take the major scale (bang) and lower every
note except the root by a half-step.
(bang) this, predictably, makes it sound a lot darker and more dissonant: after all,
you're taking a scale built out of all the bright, happy intervals and replacing it with
none of those.
it's reminiscent of another common scale called Locrian (bang) except Locrian keeps the perfect
4th from Major, which means Altered is even flatter, and thus darker.
except it's… not? or at least that's not how we use it, because it turns out something
strange happens when you flat the perfect 4th: it becomes a major 3rd. y'know, the note
that defines major modality, and is the primary signifier of musical brightness in the Western
tradition.
combine that with the b7 and suddenly we've got the makings of a dominant 7th chord, or
at least a shell voicing. we've got no perfect 5th, but that's ok, we don't really need one
anyway.
this means that, in practice, Altered is mostly used as what's called a dominant scale, which
is a scale you play over a dominant chord. because it has no 5th, though, if you're gonna
use altered for the melody it's usually useful to build the chords without 5ths too, in order
to make sure no one clashes, which lead to the development of altered chords, which are
dominant shell voicings decorated with other notes from the altered scale.
these decorations generally take the form of chord extensions, often called tensions
for short, which rely on the idea that we tend to build chords from stacks of 3rds.
like, we start with a root, go up to the 3rd, then from there another 3rd takes us to the
5th, and another one goes to the 7th. after that we hit the octave, but there's no reason
we can't keep stacking past it, giving us the 9th, 11th, and 13th to play with too.
these don't really fit neatly into our basic chord structures, so they create a more complex,
mature sound, and they show up all the time in jazz.
generally speaking, no matter what chord quality you're using, it's assumed that these tensions
are drawn from the major scale, so by default the 9th and 13th are always major and the
11th is perfect.
this doesn't always work with the underlying harmony, though: perfect 11ths, for instance,
can rub pretty hard against the 3rd in a major 7th chord, so if you want to avoid that you
can use what's called an altered tension instead, where you take one of the default tensions
and raise or lower it by a half-step.
this gives us the b9, the #9, the #11, and the b13, and here's the fun thing: all four
of those are notes in the altered scale.
you don't have any of the default tensions, but you get to choose from all the altered
ones to decorate your dominant shell voicing, which makes altered chords a great choice
when you want your dominant 7th to feel extra dissonant which, again, does cool things through
distortion.
I know I keep mentioning that but only 'cause it's super important.
viewing the Hendrix chord in the context of altered tensions would make the top note a
#9, which it is, but altered chords come from jazz, where they're usually directional, and
again, Hendrix's use is more in line with the blues tradition, so it feels like we're
still missing something.
but that's ok, I've also got another explanation for the top note: it's the minor 3rd, because
this is actually a minor 7th chord.
what? you thought it was a dominant 7th just because I repeatedly said it was, and also
because it very clearly is? wow. or, well, ok, fine, it is a dominant 7th, but it's also
a minor 7th. it's both.
it's a split chord.
split chords are chords that contain both major and minor 3rds, contrasting the two
qualities so you don't really get to settle in either one.
normally this is just major and minor triads, but Hendrix dresses it up with a minor 7th,
which means we're split between minor and dominant instead.
in split chords it's important to separate the 3rds, either by giving them to different
instruments or playing them in different registers, because if they're too close together they
rub really hard against each other and you lose those clearly defined qualities in a
sea of dissonance. this explains why the G natural is the highest note in the voicing:
it gives the G# space to breathe lower down.
I like this explanation because it means we're doubling down on what made the blues-style
dominant chord work in the first place: instead of just having the major 3rd fight the minor
7th, now it's under siege from both sides, fending off both the minor 7th and the minor
3rd. we're juxtaposing different modalities on multiple different levels, and that battle
takes place against a backdrop of intermodulation distortion between all the different notes,
muddying the waters even further.
but even more than that, we're also juxtaposing two different explanations: just because it's
a split chord doesn't mean it's not an altered chord too.
both analyses lend valuable insight into why the Hendrix chord works, so while just calling
it an E7#9 is entirely correct, I feel like it loses a little bit of what makes the chord
so perfectly Hendrix.
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