Monday, January 12, 2004

Jimi Hendrix's guitars

It's reasonably well-documented that Jimi played a right-handed Strat, strung upside down so it would be "normal" to him -- bass strings at the top. The only "hard" mods would be to reverse the nut, and put the strap button on the "wrong" horn.

This puts the pickups in a strange "shape" for the strings they refer to, and the tremolo bar under Jimi's elbow, which you can see him working in performances. There's also some people who think that the long gap from nut to tuner on the bass strings in this configuration (rather than the treble strings) makes some difference to the sound.

Still, people labor under the belief that the nut-to-tuner gap, and the odd pickup angles (especially the closest-to-saddle pickup, which is strongly angled -- presumably to compensate for something, but in the Jimi-arrangement is now doubly-wrongly compensating) contributed to Jimi's sound, and they want it, too. So Fender makes (made?) the "Voodoo" model -- a not-exactly mirror image white Strat, so right-handed players can upside-down string a left-handed guitar, becoming, I suppose, the Bizzaro-Jimi. Actually, the neck and pickups are backwards, but the "horns", controls and tremolo bar are in the conventional spots. I guess it's more of a right-handed body (with "wrongly" placed pickups) and a left-handed neck. This avoids Jimi's problem of the deeper cutaway being on the wrong side, too.