Guitar Lessons – String Bending – Lesson 23
String Bending
One
of the easiest ways to tell the difference between a seasoned guitarist
and a total amateur is to listen to their string bending. A pro or any
well practiced guitar player will have complete control over their bends
and will use a variety of different types of bends in their playing.
The pros string bends will be smooth and deliberate and won’t be bent
too much (sharp) or too little (flat) while an amateurs string bending
will be sloppy and careless.
To get a good handle on string bending,
we need to look at what bends are, the mechanics behind them and how to
use them properly. The technique of bending guitar strings is used to
add character to regular picked notes. It involves playing a note and
then exerting pressure on the string to slide it up in the fretboard
(toward the top or bottom of the neck) to change its pitch. The finger
that does the bending stays within the space between the two frets that
the bent note lies and it should sound smooth as if you simply slid your
finger up the string.
It’s not common to bend every note you
play and string bending should be used sparingly otherwise it’s effect
will be lost on the listener. Now, recall that I was talking about the
difference between pros and amateurs when they are string bending. When
we bend a note on the guitar, it’s not done hap-hazzardly and we
generally have an idea of where we want the bend to end up. By that I
mean we know what pitch the note will make before it gets bent and we
also have the sound locked in our head of what the note will sound like
after we’ve bent it.
A half step bend, or a semi-tone is the
equivalent of playing a note and then playing a note one fret higher.
For example, if you were to play the third string at the twelfth fret (a
G note) and then you bent that note up a half-step, the note you hit at
the top of the bend would be a G#. A well practiced guitarist will bend
up to the proper note 99% of the time without even thinking about it.
To take this exercise a step further,
you could also try a whole-step bend or bending one tone. This bend is
best represented by playing a note and then playing a note on the same
string two frets higher. As in our previous example, the first note
would be on the third string at the twelfth fret (still a G note) and
then at the top of the bend, you’d be playing an A note.
If you have difficulty bending the
strings, try using more than one finger. Use your ring finger on the
root note and use the index and middle finger to back up the ring finger
and give it more strength. It’s much easier to bend strings on an
electric guitar than it is on an acoustic. Try some bends all over the
neck and get used to bending to the proper pitch. In the next blog post,
we’ll dig deeper into more advanced string bending, so get bending and build those calluses up.
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