String Bends

Develop your string bending technique for guitar in this detailed lesson with audio examples, tab and notation. Get your intonation right like a guitar pro.

Students will often make mistakes in the middle of a guitar lick because of right hand trouble due to a left hand bend. The effort of bending causes tension in the pick hand....here's what to do.

Learn guitar string bending the easy way to instantly add colour to your lead guitar solos.

This is quite possibly the single most important element in guitar playing. It's your personality and your signature all in one. It's worth spending a lot of time to perfect your bends. It's your identity. String bending is a great way to make your playing stand out apart from everyone else. With a slight bend of a string you can take your soloing into a whole new dimension.

Tips for bending guitar strings.

String bending is one of the most effective techniques one can use to lend expression and emotion to lead lines. When done well, bent notes can emulate the lyrical, singing quality of the human voice and make a melody really “speak” with authority and a deep sense of feeling. This is especially true of bent vibratos, wherein a string is first bent up to a specific pitch and finger vibrato is then added to the bent note. In this lesson, I present a variety of ways to fortify and improve one’s string bending technique.

Unless you're exclusively a jazz guitarist, odds are there's going to come a time in your journey when you'll need to learn string bending techniques. Even if you're a complete beginner, you've probably heard lots of examples of string bending in the music you love: the intro to Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode', the solo to Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven' (there are some pretty massive bends on that song), the guitar solo on Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick In The Wall', and so on.

More than any other type of guitar articulation, the string bend is what makes your guitar talk (or sing or cry), giving the instrument almost voice-like expressive capabilities. Bending is nothing more than using a left-hand finger to push or pull a string out of its normal alignment, stretching it across the fingerboard toward the 6th or 1st string. As you bend a string, you raise its pitch by stretching that string.

You may know every chord in the book. You may be a master shredder. A theory whiz. But if you can't make your guitar emote, you're missing out on a whole other dimension to your playing. Your guitar speaks not only through what you play, but how you play it. The more articulate your playing, the more effectively you are able to express yourself. One of the techniques that will get your guitar talking—and wailing and moaning—is string bending

Learn to bend guitar strings.

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Welcome to video six in the Lead Guitar Quick-Start Series. In this lesson, we’re going to learn an important technique called bending, which helps you express yourself in your guitar playing. We’ll cover two types of basic bends in this lesson, starting with half-step bends and moving on to whole-step bends.

String bending is a guitar technique where fretted strings are displaced by application of a force by the fretting fingers in a direction perpendicular to their vibrating length. This has the net effect of increasing the pitch of a note. String-bending allows exploration of microtonality and can be used to give a distinctive vocal articulation to lead guitar passages.

Learn string bending techniques on the guitar.

String bending is a basic guitar technique, used a lot in blues and rock but also found a bit in most other styles (except classical). The idea is to "bend" (push a string across or over the fingerboard with your left hand fingers) so that the string gets tighter and the pitch goes up.