Players
Robin Trower
Robin Trower is the guitarist most directly associated with carrying Jimi Hendrix's approach forward after Hendrix's death. This is accurate as far as it goes, but it undersells how thoroughly Trower made that vocabulary his own. His tempo is slower, his phrasing is heavier, his tone is more saturated. The scale choices are Hendrix-derived but the emotional register is entirely different: where Hendrix was expansive and exploratory, Trower is inward and heavy, almost meditative in the weight of his sustained notes.
Start with E minor pentatonic
Trower's foundation, inherited directly from Hendrix's vocabulary. The shapes are the same. The feel is distinctly his own.
The Hendrix inheritance: what transferred and what changed
Trower absorbed the Hendrix vocabulary completely: minor pentatonic base, major pentatonic blending at resolution points, Dorian for extended minor passages, wah as a phrase amplifier, and the chord-melody integration of partial chords within lead phrases. All of these elements are present in his playing and traceable directly to Hendrix.
What changed is tempo, density, and emotional register. Hendrix moved through ideas quickly, constantly shifting between scale colors, chord fragments, and rhythmic variations. Trower slows everything down. A phrase that Hendrix might play in eight notes Trower plays in four, with each note given more time to breathe and more vibrato to sustain. The same vocabulary at half speed produces a completely different emotional effect.
This is a theory lesson in itself: the emotional content of a phrase depends not only on the notes but on the tempo and density with which they are delivered. Slow the same notes down and they become meditative. Speed them up and they become urgent. Trower chose meditation.
Major-minor pentatonic blend: the core move
Like Hendrix, Trower uses both major and minor pentatonic over the same chord progressions. The mechanism is the 3rd: the minor 3rd creates blues tension against a major or dominant chord, and the major 3rd provides resolution. Trower moves between these more slowly and deliberately than Hendrix, giving each 3rd choice more time to register emotionally.
His most characteristic application is the bend from the minor 3rd up to the major 3rd, held at the top for a full beat or more. In E, that is bending G up to G#. Over an E chord, the arrival at G# is a full, satisfying resolution. The slow bend and the sustained top note give the listener time to feel the resolution happen, which amplifies its emotional impact compared to a quick, decisive landing on the same note.
The major-minor 3rd contrast in E
Trower executes this bend slowly, holds the top note, and applies wide vibrato. The listener hears the full arc from tension to resolution. That is the whole phrase.
Dorian for modal, sustained passages
Trower's extended solo passages, particularly on longer compositions, move into Dorian territory for the same reason Hendrix and Santana used it: the raised 6th provides a brightness within the minor context that the pentatonic alone cannot produce. Over a slow, single-chord minor vamp, Dorian gives him more melodic options without changing the emotional character of the passage.
His Dorian phrasing is slow and spacious. A Dorian phrase might consist of three notes over four bars, each one sustained with vibrato, the connections between them as important as the notes themselves. The mode is not a scale to be demonstrated. It is a set of available pitches, some of which he visits when the moment calls for them.
E Dorian: Trower's extended minor voice
Load E Dorian and find F# (the raised 6th). Over a sustained Em chord, that note adds the color that keeps long slow phrases from becoming monotonous.
Wah and sustain: atmosphere as theory
Trower's signal chain produces enormous sustain. The saturated amp tone, combined with his slow picking attack and heavy strings, means notes ring for an unusually long time. That sustain is a compositional resource. He can hold a chord tone for multiple bars while the harmonic tension builds, then resolve it with a bend or a slide that the listener has been anticipating since the note began.
The wah pedal in his playing functions as an atmospheric tool as much as a pitch emphasis device. Unlike Hendrix's more percussive wah use, Trower often holds the pedal in a fixed position that emphasizes a specific frequency range and then rocks it slowly over the course of a sustained phrase. The wah creates a sweeping, psychedelic quality that amplifies the heavy, inward atmosphere of his playing without emphasizing any specific note more than others.
Together, these elements produce an atmosphere as distinctive as any scale choice. The theory behind Trower's playing is not complex. The atmosphere he creates with it is immediately recognizable and impossible to fully explain through note selection alone.
Explore Trower's scales on the fretboard
Load E minor pentatonic. Find G and G# on the same string. Bend from G to G# as slowly as possible and hold the top note. That is the fundamental Trower phrase. Everything else builds from it.