Let’s continue things this week with some more classic rock: “Little Wing” by Jimi Hendrix.
I really got into Hendrix during the final months of my senior year in high school, and as I became more familiar with Mitch Mitchell’s playing, I poked around online for some drum sheet music. This was back when my standards for transcriptions were a bit lower (along with my standards for most of the things found in the online drumosphere).
I found some sheet music for “Little Wing,” which was, uh, not… terribly great. Much like with “Good Times Bad Times,” I got inspired in college to do my own take on the song in its entirety. The transcription I had found could at least give me a head start, and since the song is barely two and a half minutes, the project didn’t take me long.
“Little Wing” has a lot of moves typical of Mitch, namely swung sixteenth notes mixed with some straight 32nd note fills around the kit. There’s also the gag where Mitch leaves the hi-hat open and closes it on the backbeats, which he was a big fan of using on slower tracks (you can hear the same thing in the first minute of “Hey Joe”).
It’s pretty well-known that there are two extra beats snuck into the verses, although it can be difficult to notice unless you count out the song. Where these extra beats are is debatable, but if we follow the progression, each phrase ends with two beats of C and 4 beats of D.* I think that makes it clear.
One of Mitch’s most famous licks is heard around the 1:04 mark:
He plays variations of this fill on many Hendrix tunes, but with how slow this song is, the pattern here has a much different lope to it.
A personal favorite lick of mine occurs just before the fade-out starts, at 2:07. It’s this linear, Bonham triplet-style fill played as straight sixteenths:
I suspect the sticking Mitch used alternates between right and left-hand leads: RLKL RKRL KLRK RLK. Fun stuff. There are a lot of cool fills on this tune, and I suppose I could have just done the fills, but whatever. As I said, the tune isn’t even two and a half minutes long.
I only hear two toms on “Little Wing”: a rack tom and a floor tom. The floor tom is tuned up pretty high, which throws me off a little bit, but I’m pretty sure there are just two toms on this track. It’s not easy to get a handle on Mitch’s kits; they’re not well-documented, and I suspect he jumped around setups somewhat spontaneously, even on the same album. Mitch’s legendary “Voodoo Child” performance has him playing on a four-tom double bass kit that almost certainly never made it into the studio.
I noticed that during the fade-out, Mitch uses an open hi-hat almost like a crash. Mitch had a funny way of crashing — he would often crash very gingerly, and sometimes he would substitute a crash cymbal for a ride tap (or in this case, an open hi-hat).
That’s about it for this one. Maybe one of these days I’ll work out the glockenspiel part…
* ^ Well, technically, the chords are pushed down a half-step, so they would be something like B and C#. But nobody thinks of it like that.
