Quick Answers:
Jimi learned how to play the guitar all by himself, first by listening to records and trying to sound exactly like them, and later by watching other people perform and copying what they did. He grew up in a time with no tablatures, no YouTube, and no Marty Music-style tutorials walking you through every riff. All he had was time, his ears, and the drive to figure it out.
While learning guitar, Jimi had many players he looked up to. When asked who his favorite guitarist was, Hendrix said he didn’t have one. He said there are so many different styles, and that it would be “bad to put everybody in the same bag.”
Nonetheless, he mentioned liking Elmore James – “The Sky is Crying” was one of Jimi’s favorite songs. He also liked John Lee Hooker and covered his song “Red House.” Other influences included Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Chuck Berry, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters, as well as newer names like Rory Gallagher, Eric Clapton, and Billy Gibbons.
Jimi Hendrix’s gear and skill, of course, expanded immensely over the following years, but this is when and how it all started. Just young Jimi Hendrix sitting in front of a record player, trying to make his guitar sound like whatever he was listening to.
To understand how Jimi first learned to play the guitar, we have to go back to 1958, when he got his very first instrument, a beat-up acoustic.
Jimi got his first guitar completely by accident. One evening, his father’s friend came over and bought a guitar with him. Young Jimi was mesmerized by the instrument, taking it out on the porch to inspect it – he carefully looked at the strings, at how they attach to the body, and explored the sensation of how the neck felt in his hand.
Seeing all this, the friend said he’d sell the guitar to Jimi for $5. With some persuasion from family friend Ernestine Benson, Jimi’s father, Al, agreed to buy it.
Being left-handed, Jimi had to reverse the strings on a right-handed guitar because left-handed models were rare and expensive. His father disapproved of him playing left-handed, calling it the Devil’s work. So Jimi found a logical workaround: he learned to play right-handed guitars upside down.
At first, he didn’t even restring them. He played them completely upside down. Eventually, he decided to switch the strings around to have the fat E string on top like it should be. After restringing, the guitar was way out of tune. All Jimi needed to fix that was to walk to a local music store and strum a properly tuned guitar. Just from that, he was able to go back home and match the pitches.
From that point on, he dedicated himself to learning. His family couldn’t afford lessons, so Jimi sat in front of a record player and tried to replicate what he heard.
His father, Al, confirmed this:
I don’t think anyone taught him how to play. I mean any artist, guitar players or singers, learn so much from other people. They just don’t go straight up from themselves. Unless they get themselves a regular musical teacher and learn straight all the way. But Jimmy just wasn’t in that kind of boat. We didn’t have that kind of money. So he just taught himself. He just picked it up. It was just in him, and the guitar became another part of his anatomy.
Al Hendrix – Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky
At one point, Hendrix said he got bored with the guitar and put it aside, only to fall back in love with it after hearing Chuck Berry:
I was about fourteen or fifteen when I started playing guitar. I played in my backyard at home, and kids used to gather ’round and said it was cool. Then I got tired of the guitar and put it aside. But when I heard Chuck Berry it revived my interest.
I learned all the riffs I could. I never had any lessons. I learned guitar from records and the radio. I loved my music, man. I’d go out to the back porch there in Seattle, because I didn’t want to stay in the house all the time, and I’d play guitar to a Muddy Waters record. You see, I wasn’t ever interested in any other things, just the music. I was trying to play like Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. Trying to learn everything and anything.
Jimi Hendrix – Starting at Zero
The story of him tuning his guitar after hearing a properly tuned one in a shop shows that he had excellent tonal memory, but not perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch means being able to name or produce a note (like E or G) with no reference. What Hendrix had was strong relative pitch and tonal recall, which is more common among self-taught musicians.
I changed the strings ’round, but it was way out of tune when I’d finished. I didn’t know a thing about tuning, so I went down to the store and ran my fingers across the strings on a guitar they had there. After that I was able to tune my own.
Jimi Hendrix – Starting at Zero
Jimi got his first electric guitar in 1959. His father bought it at Myers Music Shop in Seattle for $89. It was a white Supro Ozark 1560s, made sometime between 1957 and 1959.
The guitar had a single bridge-position pickup – very basic, but enough to play in a band. Jimi said:
When I was seventeen, I formed this group with some other guys, but they drowned me out. I didn’t know why at first, but after about three months, I realized I’d have to get an electric guitar.
Jimi Hendrix – Starting at Zero
His first gig was at a National Guard armory. He was so nervous that he had to play behind the curtains so he wouldn’t have to face the audience.
Anyway, you all had to do the same things before you could join a band. You even had to do the same steps. I started looking around for places to play. I remember my first gig was at an armory, a National Guard place, and we earned thirty-five cents apiece and three hamburgers.
It was so hard for me at first. I knew about three songs, and when it was time for us to play onstage I was all shaky, so I had to play behind the curtains. I just couldn’t get up in front. And then you get so very discouraged. You hear different bands playing around you, and the guitar player always seems like he’s so much better than you are.
Jimi Hendrix – Starting at Zero
Still, Hendrix kept at it, offering this advice to beginners:
Most people give up at this point, but it’s best not to. Just keep on, just keep on. Sometimes you are going to be so frustrated you’ll hate the guitar, but all of this is just a part of learning. If you stick with it you’re going to be rewarded. If you’re very stubborn you can make it.
Jimi Hendrix – Starting at Zero
Jimi’s guitar knowledge really expanded after he left the army and moved to Nashville. This is where he started seeing other guitarists – he would chat with them, ask them for advice on how to play something, or simply just look a how they played.
Jimi’s greatest period of learning—not experimenting with sound but simply learning styles and techniques—was in Nashville, not only because of his own innate curiosity but also because of the competition for musical dominance. Nashville was “one of the hardest audiences in the South,” Jimi insisted.“Everybody knows how to play guitar. You walk down the street and people are sitting on their porch playing more guitars. . . . That’s where I learned to play, really, in Nashville.”
Becoming Jimi Hendrix
Jimi even started performing with bands himself, and he said that he learned a lot playing in the backup band.
After a couple of months there was a soul package coming into town with Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard, B.B. King and Chuck Jackson, and I got a little job playing in the backup band. I learned an awful lot of guitar picking behind all those names every night.
Jimi Hendrix – Starting at Zero
One important lesson Jimi thought his own student, Velvert Turner, was to focus first on learning chords, and only then to transition into learning lead. Jimi said that if you learn the chords first, you can easily then learn to “paint” them with lead notes.
Jimi later tutored Velvert Turner, an aspiring teenage guitarist, about the importance of learning chords when starting out: “‘Forget about playing lead in the beginning,’” Turner recited Jimi’s lecture. “‘The main thing I want you to learn are chords. Everyone puts so much emphasis on lead guitar, but chords are more important. Because with those you can always paint colors and then put your lead on top. They’re the most important part. I’ve been playing chords half of my life in all those rhythm and blues bands.
Becoming Jimi Hendrix
