Bending

Lesson 4 from Essential Techniques For Blues Guitar

What Is It?

A 90 minute lesson about bending strings for blues guitar.

Who Is It For?

Advanced beginner and intermediate players who want to learn the mechanics of bending strings.

Detailed Description

Bending strings is an essential technique for blues guitar, and one that is much more detailed than simply pushing a string up and down. Bending is a communication tool, not simply an action.

This lesson presents a detailed breakdown of all the ingredients in a bent note. If you're a player who thinks that bending notes is simply pushing a string up and back again, this lesson will open your eyes to the most basic variable that can make a bend sound great or terrible.

The lesson is structured as follows:

  • Introduction
    A brief discussion about the effect that bending has on your guitar playing.

  • Ingredients
    9 essential ingredients to every bend, everything from starting pitch to trajectory and destination.

  • Where To Bend

    A simple guide for where to bend notes for blues guitar. This section is based on the shapes defined in the Essential Fretboard series.

  • Examples

    See how bending is used in this style of playing, single string bends, bends that utilize multiple strings, and the very difficult ascending, and 'trainwreck' bends used by Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Albert King.

  • Questions

    Provides answers to some common questions that aren't covered in other parts of the lesson.

  • What's Wrong With This Bend?
    A fun section where I play a bend with bad technique, and explain what I'm doing wrong.

  • Exercises

    Several simple exercises to improve your ability to detect when you've hit the target pitch of a bend correctly, and others to help you understand how to mute strings as you bend.

Supplementary Materials

The lesson comes with tablature for the exercises in PDF format. Since the examples are very simple, the tablature is probably unnecessary, but it is available.