Jimi Hendrix

This is the very song Chandler heard in a New York café before deciding on London. The Experience's first single, it records the moment the former sideman first stood at center stage.

• In the brief phrase at the top of the song, where the guitar slides down from a high note, you can seem to hear the habits of his hands from his R&B sideman days.
• The chords form a cycle of five, each climbing a step in turn and circling back again, creating a tension as if the song were spinning without end. Over it, Mitchell's drums scatter jazz-style ornamental fills.
• The female chorus in the background was overdubbed later, when Chandler brought in the girl group the Breakaways for the radio version. The contrast between the raw playing and the smooth chorus is worth listening for.
• The vocal is less singing than a low, spoken address. Questions and answers pass back and forth, like a conversation with a betrayed man.
• At Monterey in 1967, he played the solo by plucking the strings with his teeth. Listen to the studio and filmed versions side by side and you can see how showmanship and musicianship overlap.

The single that captures, in its most concentrated form, the fuzz and feedback he tamed in London. He said it began with a dream in which he walked under the sea.

• In the first two bars, the guitar's high note and the bass's low note ring out at the most uncomfortably clashing interval (an augmented fourth, the tritone). The unease of the whole song starts here.
• The sharp chord that follows the repeated phrase (the riff) sounds as though major and minor were mixed together at once, and it later earned the nickname the Hendrix chord.
• In the solo, the Octavia, a device built by engineer Roger Mayer, layers in a note an octave higher, so the guitar sounds like a metallic whistle.
• At the end of the song the tape speed shifts and the sound pans from side to side, so that on headphones it seems to swirl around your head.

The album that followed the flames of Monterey, placing delicate rhythm guitar and studio experiment at its center in place of the roar of the stage.

• The signature song “Little Wing” is a short piece of just over two minutes, and the sound slowly vanishes (fades out) just as the solo is in full flight. That pang of being cut off when you want to hear more is part of the song.
• The guitar on “Little Wing” runs through an organ speaker whose speaker spins round and round inside (a Leslie speaker), producing a sound that ripples like waves.
• The rhythm guitar, which holds a chord while slipping in ornaments with the thumb and other fingers, is a style he learned from R&B guitarists like Curtis Mayfield. You can hear it clearly in the introduction to “Little Wing.”
• On the album's first track, “EXP,” the feedback flies between the left and right speakers. On headphones you can hear for yourself the stereo-placement experiments with Kramer.

He had found the courage to sing in Dylan, and on this recording he made Dylan's song wholly his own. Dylan himself later said that he came to play the song following this arrangement.

• Dylan's original is a modest song for acoustic guitar and harmonica. Listen to the original first and then to this record, and it becomes clear how the same song can turn into a storm.
• The acoustic guitar with twelve strings (12-string guitar) was played by Traffic's Dave Mason, and when Redding walked out during the session, Hendrix played the bass himself.
• The solo in the middle falls into four parts: a clean tone, the sound of a lighter slid along the strings, the sound of a pedal that changes the tone underfoot (wah-wah pedal), and a passage of chopped chords.
• He layered guitar upon guitar onto this track over several months (overdubbing). It is worth following which speaker each of the stacked guitars comes out of.

Born of an all-night jam at the Record Plant, it is the closing track of Electric Ladyland.

• In the intro he strums with the strings lightly muted under his hand while working the wah-wah pedal, producing a sound like someone muttering to himself.
• Recorded in May 1968 in front of a television film crew. It is a short, hard-hitting reworking of “Voodoo Chile,” the 15-minute blues he had played the day before with Winwood and Casady.
• Mitchell's drums cut in as if conversing with the guitar rather than keeping time. Listen for the stretch of the solo where the drum fills answer the guitar phrases.
• Live, he often stretched it past 10 minutes. Compare the 1970 concert footage and you can hear a different solo emerge from the same skeleton every time.

The American national anthem, played at the height of the Vietnam War by a Black guitarist who had served as a paratrooper; it went on to become the recording that symbolizes the era.

• He ran a white Stratocaster into Marshall amps, adding a device that makes the sound ripple like water (Uni-Vibe) and fuzz. The melody itself he plays straight, note for note as written.
• At the lines that sing of rockets and bombs, he pushes the bar on the guitar's bridge (tremolo arm) down deep so the notes cave in, and uses feedback to paint bombardment and sirens.
• When it ends, he goes straight into “Purple Haze” without a pause. The way he joins the anthem and his own song in a single flow has to be heard as part of the whole.
• He played the piece often in concert from 1968 on. The Woodstock version was recorded on a Monday morning after most of the audience had left, so even the silences between the sounds come through clearly.

The centerpiece of the live album Band of Gypsys, released as the price of the $1 contract. He dedicated the song to those fighting in the streets and on the battlefield.

• Buddy Miles's snare (snare drum) mimics machine-gun fire with short, clipped bursts. Follow this rhythm from the very start of the song.
• Billy Cox's bass repeats the same short figure from beginning to end (ostinato), tamping down the ground. That is why the guitar can sway so freely on top of it.
• In the middle of the solo, the passage where he stretches a single note endlessly through feedback and then lets it collapse sounds like a falling bomb. The Uni-Vibe makes the whole sound shimmer.
• Toward the end, Miles's high, scream-like backing vocal is a wordless wail that carries the song's terror into the human voice.