Help needed on basic bending and vibrato...

Hello, everyone.

During today's practice, I decided to try and spice up a pretty simple solo by adding some bends and vibrato, but every time I tried to bend the strings, the strings were muted instead of changing pitch. I did it as described in the Bends and Vibrato tutorial, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing something horribly wrong, since my strings are just muffled if not completely muted. Can someone please help me out?

Could it be that you are pushing the finger toward the fret, and getting a little up over the fret?

I tried to duplicate your problem and found if I pushed toward the fret, the volume would die.

Let me know if that worked?

Jon

Barrowing from Jon’s idea I picked up my guitar and watched how my fingers moved. Once my finger is on the string and it’s ringing, I just push or pull to make it move, but my finger tip does not roll on the string at all. The angle of the tip of my finger to the neck never changes in relationship to the neck. So my top knuckle never moves and the bottom two knuckles do the moving of the string. Make sure you are pushing down on the string as you are pushing/pulling.

Originally Posted by: haghj500Barrowing from Jon’s idea I picked up my guitar and watched how my fingers moved. Once my finger is on the string and it’s ringing, I just push or pull to make it move, but my finger tip does not roll on the string at all. The angle of the tip of my finger to the neck never changes in relationship to the neck. So my top knuckle never moves and the bottom two knuckles do the moving of the string. Make sure you are pushing down on the string as you are pushing/pulling.

Well, that could explain what I'm doing wrong. In all the videos I've watch that include bends in the riffs, I always thought they push with the tip of the finger, so that's what I've been trying to do. No wonder it didn't work out as planned...

When I get the chance, I'll try doing it as you explained, hopefully with better results.

Key is, you are not applying any less pressure on the string than you did when to just simply fretted the note.

You probably know this.

But, there are a million different ways to bend a note. What pretty much remains true is that little of the bend has to do with your finger bending the note. A bend involves your finger (a little) and your wrist a bit and even your arm/forearm.

Eric Clapton uses just about his full forearm and his elbow as the pivot point to bend and shake a note. Others use more wrist.

This is important because, what the larger bunch of body parts does is what was said above, keeps your finger on the same spot of the string.

When you watch someone here or on Youtube, watch their wrist and arm too.

If you just push up the note with your finger muscle, your losing the strength of your grip on the string itself. using the bigger muscle groups instead of your finger allows your contact/grip in the string at the point of contact much more strongly.

This is my take, anyway.

Originally Posted by: KasperowDuring today's practice, I decided to try and spice up a pretty simple solo by adding some bends and vibrato, but every time I tried to bend the strings, the strings were muted instead of changing pitch.

I cover some of the basic mechanics of bending in these lessons.

http://www.guitartricks.com/lesson.php?input=15905&s_id=1147

http://www.guitartricks.com/lesson.php?input=20406&s_id=1614

Hope those help!