Chords for Drum Lesson: How To Play "Purple Haze" On Drums

[Eb] _ _ [G] _ _ _ _ _ _
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_ _ [E] My name is Andy [N] Dorshuk.
I'm the editor of Drum Magazine.
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_ _ And welcome to the first installment of our series of Mitch Mitchell drum parts
that are going to be taken off the first two albums recorded by the Jimi Hendrix [A] Experience.
[Bb] Now you may wonder why we're focusing on Mitch Mitchell.
_ [Gm] Reason number one, he's my favorite drummer of [Dm] all time.
But I [Bb] don't believe it's just [Eb] personal taste.
I think that you can quantify how Mitch contributed [N] greatly to the rock drumming vocabulary.
And how _ when Hendrix [Em] released Are [N] You Experienced?
It was a pivotal point [Dbm] for drumming where it [D] really, [Eb] truly was the beginning of the [A] fusion movement,
even [Gb] though the word fusion hadn't come up yet.
In other words, Mitch took a lot of jazz licks and chops and concepts
[D] and applied them to [Gb] Hendrix's really heavy rock, _ _ [N] psychedelic rock,
that was really a new sound at the time.
So [Gm] we're going to start with cut number one, [Ebm] Purple Haze,
an extremely famous [Eb] song [N] by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from Are You Experienced? _ _
Picture this.
This is exactly what listeners heard when they first dropped a meme on Are You Experienced,
Hendrix's debut album.
They heard Jimi Hendrix and bassist Nolan Redding [Bb] playing that really famous, _ dissonant, [A] heavy lick on guitar [N] and bass,
_ which went on for [Bb] two bars before Mitch [C] Mitchell came in playing more on the snare drum
and a bass drum part that's a little different.
_ [Bb] Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, who's on this?
Who's this [N] person? _
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_ _ _ So after the introduction, Mitch does a little fill and goes into the verse playing a beat that he used on a lot of those early Hendrix tracks.
It's his variation on a booger lick.
[Bbm] We're definitely going to investigate that further [Gbm] in upcoming lessons.
Here's what it sounded like after he [N] came in on the first verse of Purple Haze. _ _ _ _
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Here's the [C] thing that's interesting about that part.
It's like Mitchell was laying down the law about how [A] he was going to take drumming, rock drumming, in a whole different direction.
[C] Prior to him, the [E] fanciest drummers around were guys like Keith [Bb] Moon, who were just sort of wild, flailing around.
[C] I love Keith Moon.
I'm not putting him down.
But the thing about Mitchell is that he took that sort of fury that Moon had and applied a jazzy context for it, which had never been done before.
And so in this case, right off the bat on Purple Haze, the [Bbm] first song on Are You Experienced, [C] every two bars he plays a fill, taking you into the next two [D] bars.
_ [Bbm] And that was, [C] you have to consider, that was really [Bbm] unorthodox.
_ Here are a couple [Eb] of examples of fills on Are You Experienced.
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_ _ _ _ So [Db] _ _
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_ _ after _ the third verse, when you hit the end of Purple Haze, it just sort of jams on the one there.
And [C] Mitchell really opens up his fills and starts going crazy and starts giving you a taste of where he is going to go from there.
_ Here are some of the ideas that he's using with that fill.
Hendrix is just jamming on the guitar, [Bbm] Redding's just holding down one, and Mitchell's playing like this.
[N] _ _ _
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[N] _ _ _ _ _ _ [E] _ _
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_ _ _ _ _ [G] That's it.
I mean, there's a lot more to Purple Haze than [Bbm] that, but those are the basics that you can work with.
And the great thing about playing Mitch Mitchell songs is you should not be afraid to improvise.
He was all about improvisation.
So, take that basic skeleton.
_ _ Thanks for coming to