I'm not saying he was bad or less than good, but he wasn't any better than Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Peter Green, Frank Zappa or Eric Clapton were at the time to name a few. He had enough technique certainly, but it is not what made him outstanding, which he certainly was. He was certainly a better guitarist than a singer though! But even his voice, limited range and all, was unmistakeable.
I've heard a lot of Jimi Hendrix stuff pre-Experience, Germany was flooded with bootlegs and icky "official" releases of his older work in the seventies. I even heard stuff of him with that US Army band he played in. He played like a pro, but a sideman pro in those line ups. Nice choppy rhythm guitar too. People may sniff att Redding's and Mitchell's bass and drum skills all they want, but it was those two that gave Hendrix the foil for his groundbreaking stuff. And groundbreaking he was. When the Experience conquered England, Clapton, Beck, Page and Blackmore all checked him out. And when Blackmore asked Beck how the new black cat on the block was and whether the accolades were true, Beck, who had just witnessed a concert, said: "He went straight between the eyes." A phrase Blackers memorized and would use for a Rainbow album in the early eighties. Hendrix certainly influenced Clapton, Beck and Blackmore - all three were Gibson players when they saw him, all three would become Strat guitar heroes not so long after. And Blackmore's seventies style owes a heap to Hendrix, he has similar playful drama in his playing. If you listen to old DP records you can hear that come 1969 Blackmore changed his style and sound radically and he was not afraid to cop some Hendrix mannerisms either. When it comes to white guys emulating Hendrix, people tend to think of the usual suspects such as Robin Trower and Frank Marino, but it was Blackmore in fact who incorporated parts of Hendrix style into his own first, the hard rock Hendrix so to say. There is not so much of that evident today anymore, much of that has to do that Blackmore hardly uses bendings with Blackmore's Night anymore, just trills, because he is of the view that renaissance music did not know bendings. Hey, and Clapton, by his own admission even copped Hendrix' 'fro in Cream!