Normally, I don’t like virtuoso guitar pieces. They bring to mind too many players like Yngwie Malmsteen, Michael Angelo, and Steve Vai. There are a rare few pieces that are genuinely amazing though, and one of them is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s adaptation of Hendrix’s “Little Wing.”

Stratocasters are unforgiving instruments. They catch everything. The difference between a picked note and a legato note is completely clear. If your pick scrapes as you’re picking a string, you can hear it. A lot of times, this is a bad thing—try watching some people’s performances of this cover—but here, it’s something really special. Everything about Stevie Ray Vaughan’s performance is perfect. The dynamic range is abnormally broad, with delicate and perfectly articulated pieces as well as the screaming bent notes that the guitar is famous for. The trills are buttery, and some of the faster picked passages seem to melt into legato that drips off the fretboard. The way notes are picked is used to as much effect as whether they’re picked: quiet sections using the middle or neck pickup¹ are picked cleanly, giving a bubbling articulation, and the screaming sections have more scrape to the picking, which combines with the overdrive and the noise from the vibrato² to give a more Janis-Joplin-made-of-wood feel. Every single note in the recording, and how each one is played, is completely deliberate.

If you can, I suggest listening to this straight off the CD or in the best quality you can find on a good stereo. The amazing thing about this performance isn’t just that it’s beautiful or that it’s hard to play, it’s that it’s played in a way that uses every nuance of the instrument to its advantage, and that’s the mark of a true master.

1) The strat has three pickups, one close to the neck, one close to the bridge, and one in the middle. Since the neck pickup is closer to the peak position of the fundamental, its tone is dominated by the fundamental and the first overtones and sounds warm and slightly muted. The bridge pickup is much further from the peak of the fundamental and so picks up higher order overtones and sounds much brighter.

2) It’s audible on every setting, especially on a strat, and especially on the bridge pickup: the sound of the string scraping on the fret. The most famous example is the beginning of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 10:14 am and is filed under Music, Smart-Sounding Babble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.