You never heard Jimi play acoustic, have you???
I saw this programme on the South bank show about 15 years ago about Jimi and at the very end as the credits were running, they played a clip of him playing the acoustic. It was pretty mesmerizing but that may have been because, until the clip Rami posted, I'd never seen him play acoustic.
I read in a guitar magazine in the early 80's that Hendrix did not create the backwards guitar thing (lead guitar playing backwards in song)
I didnt get my info off the internet
He probably didn't "create" it. I think the Beatles did it first, though I'm not sure of the chronology.
There had been a novelty song with backwards recording prior to 1966 but in rock, the first constructive and deliberate use of it is the lead guitar in the Beatles' "I'm only sleeping". This might surprize people who would cite "Rain" and "Tomorrow never knows" but "Rain came about by accident (depending on who you believe it was either John Lennon putting the tape on the wrong way round or George Martin in the experimental climate of 'Revolver' thinking it was a good idea on "Rain) and "Tomorrow never knows" has Paul McCartney's "Taxman" solo cut up and spun in backwards. But "I'm only sleeping" was the first time they actually consciously put it in as part of the song.
After the effect, for a couple of years, backwards recordings in songs were relatively common. Hendrix, like many of his ilk, seized upon the prevailing ideas of the times and put his own inventive spin on it.
As was mentioned before, Jimi was his own engineer in the studio, for some of his greatest work. So, it's not as if we're talking about some average guitar player who only sounded better because of studio tricks.
To be honest, I don't think any of the mid to late 60s groups were made to sound good by studio jiggery pokery. The songs and performances were there. The studio gadgetry were good enhancers. And a number of artists at the time were interested in sonics and pushed those boundaries. Hendrix was one of them. He had a studio built though he didn't record much there before he died.
Jimi was awesome just playing straight blues without any "effects".
One of the first things I ever read about Hendrix came from Alexis Korner. He said "He was the personification of black music.....Hendrix had this horrible feeling that he wasn't playing the blues. Such an idea coming from someone that was able to play the blues as well as he could I found very strange. The trouble was that he didn't play it in the watered down form which had come to be accepted as the blues. Amazingly, he felt guilty because he was playing it perfectly". Phew !
Led Zeppelin didn't invent reverb. But it doesn't make Jimmy Page less of a great producer for using it so inovatively.
Jimmy Page was once asked what innovations he had come up with, if any, on "Led Zeppelin" and he said he pioneered the use of backwards echo on songs like "You shook me". It was noticing him always listed as producer on the Led Zeppelin Lps that first tweaked my desire to get involved in the engineering/production side of music as well as the playing and writing bit.
} on both electric and acoustic and was a more than handy producer and songwriter. Because he had been an in demand session man from 1964 {played on stuff by the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, Dusty Springfield, Donovan, Tom Jones and 100s of hits.....} he possessed as a guitar player and songwriter one of the most priceless commodities - pop sensibility. Whatever you want to say about Led Zeppelin, their music was accessible and hummable as well as being heavy, folksy, bluesy and kind of versatile.