Blues-rock newcomer Amani Burnham’s love of full-step bends, trills and pentatonic fills leads to inevitable Jimi Hendrix comparisons, but his style isn’t outright mimicry – the 20-year-old happens to draw inspiration from the same well of artists as the guitar icon.
“Chuck Berry was my first guitar hero,” he says on a call from his Connecticut home, where he also grew up listening to the Beatles, Little Richard and Fats Domino records in his father’s collection. “But the stuff Hendrix was feeling in that moment was coming out of his guitar,” he says. “I was very intrigued by that and also the sort of lyrics that he came up with and the chord changes.”
The guitar playing on his debut album, Roots & Wings, owes a lot to this lineage, including downstream players like Stevie Ray Vaughan and the funk that arose in Hendrix’s wake.
Burnham’s twist is his right-hand style – instead of using a pick, he thumbs single notes and strums chords by joining his index and middle fingers, letting the other fingers fall in line behind them.
While his tone is somehow every bit as bright and sharp as if he used a pick, his fretting-hand dexterity helps him pull off tricky licks. “There are certain things that I have to compensate for,” he says. “If I want to play really fast, it's a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs.”
Burnham deploys all this through a fairly straightforward rig without a lot of tools to hide behind. His main guitars are a Fender Stratocaster and a Warren Blues Maker, a Jazzmaster-style ax he assembled from parts with help from friend Ty Warren.
On Roots & Wings, he played those through a small, 25-watt Fender amp with a 10-inch speaker, occasionally augmented by a Hendrix-approved Fuzz Face pedal and a Dunlop Cry Baby wah.
Social media has played a big role in Burnham’s rise, exposing his guitar playing to a wide audience and netting him a deal with Blind Pig Records.
Videos like the breakout clip showing him playing the Willie Dixon tune Hoochie Coochie Man have amassed 30 million views across platforms. “With that video blowing up, the sort of comments I got were from people digging the way I was playing or asking ‘what song is this?’, which I thought was funny. But it’s also important for people to know where modern rock started.”
- Roots & Wings is out now via Blind Pig
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
