Music
The song is known for its use of the "Hendrix chord" (dominant 7 #9) played as the first chord after the introduction. This chord structure was often used in jazz by artists such as Horace Silver in the early 1960s, but was not used in rock on a regular basis. The intro itself is notable for its prominent use of the distinctive tritone interval, also used commonly by jazz musicians. It is sounded when Hendrix plays an E7 #9 (low to high: E, G#, B, D, F##) on the guitar while the bass plays a B flat (and its octave). The guitar solo is played through an Octavia, an effects pedal that increases notes by one octave. The effect was developed by Roger Mayer, an acoustical and electronics engineer, and Mayer claims he made it in cooperation with Jimi Hendrix.
Read more about this topic: Purple Haze
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“He turned out to belong to the type of publisher who dreams of becoming a male muse to his author, and our brief conjunction ended abruptly upon his suggesting I replace chess by music and make Luzhin a demented violinist.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“But the dark changed to red, and torches shone,
And deafening music shook the leaves; a troop
Shouldered a litter with a wounded man,
Or smote upon the string and to the sound
Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)