Style
Author Harry Shapiro examined the song, saying musically it is "structured to lay a gossamer touch across the whole song from the arresting opening statement and the haunting glockenspiel to the use of a Leslie speaker cabinet for the guitar. The speaker baffle rotates, creating a Doppler effect of rising and falling waves of sound. Jimi plays the song almost like a pianist with the thumb fretting the bass notes like the pianist's left hand, while the fingers of the fretting hand correspond to the right. The song fades on a magical solo after only two minutes and twenty-five seconds. Even live, 'Little Wing' was hardly any longer – he said what he wanted to say and stopped."
While on the initial studio track Hendrix played his guitar through a Leslie speaker, which was normally used with Hammond organs, the simultaneous use of a distortion effect gave the guitar a unique sound. During live shows and on later recordings, Hendrix "used the 'Univibe' effect pedal to get a simulated Leslie sound, instead of using a real speaker."
Due to the heavy use of studio recording techniques in creating the Axis: Bold as Love album, only "Spanish Castle Magic" and "Little Wing" were performed regularly at concerts.
Read more about this topic: Little Wing
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Carlyle must undoubtedly plead guilty to the charge of mannerism. He not only has his vein, but his peculiar manner of working it. He has a style which can be imitated, and sometimes is an imitator of himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)