Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix was a natural right-hander who played a right-handed Fender Stratocaster flipped upside down and restrung for left-handed playing. This reversed the string angle at the nut and bridge, subtly changing the string tension and contributing to his unique tone, the low strings had slightly more slack and the high strings felt tighter than on a standard setup.

The legendary solo tones on "All Along The Watchtower" were achieved in part by recording multiple guitar overdubs with different amp settings and combining them, engineer Eddie Kramer stacked takes to create that massive, layered sound. There are at least four distinct guitar parts on the track.

Hendrix often tuned his guitar down a half step to Eb standard (Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb), which gave his strings a slinkier feel for bending and contributed to the slightly darker, heavier character of his tone compared to standard-tuned players.

On "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," the iconic opening wah-wah riff was essentially a first take from a jam session. The track captures Hendrix improvising with the wah pedal in a way that made the guitar sound almost vocal, he was rocking the pedal in rhythm with his picking attack.

Hendrix would sometimes play with his guitar's pickup selector in the 'in-between' positions on his Stratocaster, positions 2 and 4, which on vintage Strats weren't detented and required balancing the switch. These out-of-phase tones became a hallmark of his cleaner rhythm sounds, especially on "Little Wing."

He used lighter gauge strings (typically .010 sets) at a time when most blues and rock players were still using heavy .012 or .013 gauge sets. This made his aggressive bending style physically possible and influenced the lighter string trend that followed.

During the recording of "Purple Haze," Hendrix ran his guitar through an Octavia pedal built by Roger Mayer, which doubled the signal an octave up. That buzzy, almost synth-like quality in the solo section was one of the first uses of octave-fuzz on a major rock recording.