Bend Vibrato - Will The Penny Ever Drop?

ryanverbena

I know this sounds sloppy but just really wanted to get the lack of "musical" vibrato thing across. Open to any other criticisms while we're at it!

Danny1969

That's not so bad.

First thing practice your vibrato at the point of least resistance  ... so around the 12th fret. 
Now practice bending up the B string a tone .... this is easier to get spot on 

Then work your way down the fretboard. 

digitalkettle

ryanverbena said:

I know this sounds sloppy but just really wanted to get the lack of "musical" vibrato thing across. Open to any other criticisms while we're at it!

Kudos for posting...hope you get lots of help here.

Tone is nice...'touch' is good...pitching is okay.

I would take this issue back a step and fundamentally look at your vibrato *without bending* first.

Observations:

1. that first bend at 0:02 (10th fret B string) shows signs of where you want to be...just needs to be more meaty
2. immediately afterwards the 1st finger on 7th fret B string is everything that's wrong for me: you've got barely any purchase on the neck, it's kinda rapid fire (not sexy like!), and it feels/sounds/looks entirely sharp (where's the note you started on?!!)
3. well pitched whole-tone bend at 0:07 (9th fret G string) followed by another wobble like point #2 above
4. another flash of where you want to be at 0:18
5. ...and so on...

Your bending is good...your vibrato needs work...there's hope

Everyone's different but my advice would be to stop hanging that thumb over the top all the time.

sev112

digitalkettle said:

It's not a 'door handle' movement...that's pronation/supination. 

That’s odd - in golf, pronation/ supination is the “flapping” motion of the hand at the wrist rather than the door handle this, to the left or right.  It’s really quite relevant in golf swing mechanics.
I might have to get the biomechanics book out from the loft and check

Back to the main subject, I’m thinking it’s all about fast twitch muscles/fibres, and if you don’t have them, you don’t have them

digitalkettle

sev112 said:

digitalkettle said:

It's not a 'door handle' movement...that's pronation/supination. 

That’s odd - in golf, pronation/ supination is the “flapping” motion of the hand at the wrist rather than the door handle this, to the left or right.  It’s really quite relevant in golf swing mechanics.
I might have to get the biomechanics book out from the loft and check

I was thinking of the 'door handle' movement as a forearm thing:

• pronation: palm faces downwards
• supination: palm faces upwards

sev112 said:

Back to the main subject, I’m thinking it’s all about fast twitch muscles/fibres, and if you don’t have them, you don’t have them

Is a tasty vibrato really a 'fast twitch' thing? Pretty rare that I want to hear it happening with high speed.

Disclaimer: I dropped Biology as soon as

CaseOfAce

It takes guts posting a video of yourself playing - respect...!

I think you're on the right track - I can see what you mean about the lack of control when bending right at the end of the video - but you've got the foundation there - it just needs working on.

I think you just need to play, play, play - and most importantly build up the hand strength. Perhaps learn a few classic rock solos - Hotel California is a bending masterclass...

and even the greats don't always get it right!

Caffeine_Vampire

When you're bending the g try pulling the string down towards the floor rather than bending up and see how that feels.

ryanverbena

digitalkettle said:

ryanverbena said:

I know this sounds sloppy but just really wanted to get the lack of "musical" vibrato thing across. Open to any other criticisms while we're at it!

Kudos for posting...hope you get lots of help here.

Tone is nice...'touch' is good...pitching is okay.

I would take this issue back a step and fundamentally look at your vibrato *without bending* first.

Observations:

1. that first bend at 0:02 (10th fret B string) shows signs of where you want to be...just needs to be more meaty
2. immediately afterwards the 1st finger on 7th fret B string is everything that's wrong for me: you've got barely any purchase on the neck, it's kinda rapid fire (not sexy like!), and it feels/sounds/looks entirely sharp (where's the note you started on?!!)
3. well pitched whole-tone bend at 0:07 (9th fret G string) followed by another wobble like point #2 above
4. another flash of where you want to be at 0:18
5. ...and so on...

Your bending is good...your vibrato needs work...there's hope

Everyone's different but my advice would be to stop hanging that thumb over the top all the time.

This is absolutely brilliant thank you! Really appreciate you taking the time. This will give me plenty to work through over the weekend. Again, thanks very much!

Danny1969 said:

That's not so bad.

First thing practice your vibrato at the point of least resistance  ... so around the 12th fret. 
Now practice bending up the B string a tone .... this is easier to get spot on 

Then work your way down the fretboard. 

Cheers - up the neck I go!CaseOfAce said:

It takes guts posting a video of yourself playing - respect...!

I think you're on the right track - I can see what you mean about the lack of control when bending right at the end of the video - but you've got the foundation there - it just needs working on.

I think you just need to play, play, play - and most importantly build up the hand strength. Perhaps learn a few classic rock solos - Hotel California is a bending masterclass...

and even the greats don't always get it right!

Appreciate the advice mate!!

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in, if I could have dropped more than just one wisdom for each post I would have.

It really is a special community when you can post something like that on the internet and not get completely mauled for how bad it is. You've all given me plenty to think about, and lots of tangible advice that will hopefully culminate in progress.

Most importantly, it's back to putting in some solid hours practise for me now!

*Cheers legends!!*

fastonebaz

ANGUS YOUNG NAILS IT.  WATCH AND LEARN FROM HIM. 

tdan71

Hi

Your tone sounds great.
How do you get on with shorter scale types of guitars, Les Pauls etc? My first experiment would be to try something like that with 9's / hybrids on.
 You may just have a grumpy tight Strat! I would go and bother my local guitar shop till I found one It was easier to it with irrelevant of the guitar type.

JonnyBgoode

I can see exactly why you are having problems, both with the bend/vibrato but also the vibrato on its own. You need to pivot around the thumb and get the wrist rocking around it back and forth, you are not doing this.

I would start without the bend and get a nice vibrato over a note first, then only when this is working learn to add vibrato to the top of a bend which is trickier.

At the moment you are tensing up and kind of trembling your hand over the note. You need to relearn the movement.

Start slowly, *use a metronome* and holding a note bend it up a semitone on one beat and release back down to the note on the next beat, keep doing this it will teach you control + timing and hitting accurate pitch. You should be able to do this bending up OR pulling down on the note (towards the floor, obviously not on 1st string), 3rd string is good place to start due to the lower tension. Put your whole wrist into those bends/pulls, the movement is not generated by  the fingers. Try different metronome settings, slow, very slow, fast etc Use your ears to guide you

Once you can do this consistently do the same by bending/pulling a whole tone, which will be harder. Only by learning this slowly will you get out of that trembling motion which is  currently your default (replacing bad habits is much harder than learning them correctly in the first place).

HTH, troubleshooting technique problems with just words is not always great, 10 mins with a good teacher would have saved you four years :-)

BlueStrat

One bit of advice that helped me was to ease off on the pressure on the string, I used to strangle the thing. That took me more work than I would have thought as I had to unlearn self taught bad habits!
another great bit of advice I was given was to raise the action a bit - I’d always thought you had to have it low to the point of just not buzzing. But try raising the action and see if that helps you as much as it did me. 

Best of luck - we’re all always learning, that’s the great thing about tfb your fellow players have made the same mistakes and are happy to share their collective wisdom

DefaultM

It's not bad actually. Sort of looks like you're struggling to bend the note quite up to pitch, and then using the vibrato to get it there.
I would concentrate on getting the bends right, so fret the 15th fret B and get the sound, then bend the 13th up to match the sound. 
I tend to go for a wider slower vibrato with my first finger. You can do that thing where you splay your other fingers off the fretboard and then you've got a nicer pivot point for your wrist.

ryanverbena

tdan71 said:

Hi

Your tone sounds great.
How do you get on with shorter scale types of guitars, Les Pauls etc? My first experiment would be to try something like that with 9's / hybrids on.
 You may just have a grumpy tight Strat! I would go and bother my local guitar shop till I found one It was easier to it with irrelevant of the guitar type.

I will try and incorporate all the great advice using my Les Paul as you suggest which happens to have the Ernie Ball hyrbid 9's on it too. I hadn't really noticed it being any easier in the past, although I had kind of accepted that I just couldn't do it at that point. Will try!

JonnyBgoode said:

I can see exactly why you are having problems, both with the bend/vibrato but also the vibrato on its own. You need to pivot around the thumb and get the wrist rocking around it back and forth, you are not doing this.

I would start without the bend and get a nice vibrato over a note first, then only when this is working learn to add vibrato to the top of a bend which is trickier.

At the moment you are tensing up and kind of trembling your hand over the note. You need to relearn the movement.

Start slowly, *use a metronome* and holding a note bend it up a semitone on one beat and release back down to the note on the next beat, keep doing this it will teach you control + timing and hitting accurate pitch. You should be able to do this bending up OR pulling down on the note (towards the floor, obviously not on 1st string), 3rd string is good place to start due to the lower tension. Put your whole wrist into those bends/pulls, the movement is not generated by  the fingers. Try different metronome settings, slow, very slow, fast etc Use your ears to guide you

Once you can do this consistently do the same by bending/pulling a whole tone, which will be harder. Only by learning this slowly will you get out of that trembling motion which is  currently your default (replacing bad habits is much harder than learning them correctly in the first place).

HTH, troubleshooting technique problems with just words is not always great, 10 mins with a good teacher would have saved you four years :-)

This is great! Thanks for taking the time to communicate the wisdom - you've laid out some great exercise tips and the reality of relearning the muscle memory etc. It makes sense, I regret never having a lesson before. Makes sense that I'm now plagued with a decades worth of consolidating bad technique. Cheers!

BlueStrat said:

One bit of advice that helped me was to ease off on the pressure on the string, I used to strangle the thing. That took me more work than I would have thought as I had to unlearn self taught bad habits!
another great bit of advice I was given was to raise the action a bit - I’d always thought you had to have it low to the point of just not buzzing. But try raising the action and see if that helps you as much as it did me. 

Best of luck - we’re all always learning, that’s the great thing about tfb your fellow players have made the same mistakes and are happy to share their collective wisdom

Thanks mate - I think this will be the biggest hurdle for me, unlearning the bad habits and easing off on gripping the neck. I hadn't thought of the action but the Strat is due for a re-string soon so might play around with that when I do. 

Agree about your comment about TFB members - what a good bunch of humans!

roberty

Your technique looks good mate. Definitely got the right idea. You're getting a nice sound out of the guitar too. I would focus next on making your vibrato on the unbent strings wider and more controlled, using the same motion as the one you are using to bend. Once you've got this going you can start applying it to the string when it is bent to pitch

tone1

Good god…I’m about to offer technique advice on a public guitar forum….I’d try a 3rd finger bend assisted by the other 2 fingers on the G string and then anchor your pinky on the B string a fret higher.A bit more finger relaxing/tensioning after the bend (to get your vibrato) rather than getting your shoulder a body too involved….Sounded really nice though…

viz

I think you’re nearly there, but I wanna say something a bit different. Vibrato is a musical device, not a technique on its own. It exists to do something to the music, to the note, and that thing isn’t (normally) just to give a generic warble or wobble. It could be to make the music sound more aggressive, or to make the note warm up, or to give more romanticism to it, or to amplify the rhythmical aspect of the music, or whatever. Or you could just be using it to overcome innacurate tuning. 

So I’d ask, do you really know in your mind’s ear exactly what you are wanting it to sound like? Can you sing it? Because that will influence greatly how you try to play it. There are loads of different vibrato sounds and you can tell which technique a guitarist uses with your eyes shut. You can even identify some players by their vibrato alone if they stick to one type. For example: do you want to dip below the target note briefly and return (accentuates the rhythm and sounds tragic)? Or oscillate above and below the note (makes it warm and seductive)? Or oscillate above the note only (sounds a bit disconcerting and challenging)? Do you want it fast (increases the energy of the music)? Or slow (dampens the energy)? High amplitude or barely noticeable (affects the aggressiveness of the music)? Start slow and get quicker (sounds panicky and weird)? Start low amplitude and get more pronounced (great for warming up long notes)? Quick when rising and slow when descending? Or vice versa? So many choices - they all sound different and they all create a different mood. When you know exactly what effect you’re trying to do, so that you could sing it, then some of the techniques described by the contributors to this thread will be better for you than others. Some vibrato is best done with a single finger, others with backup fingers shoring up behind, others by pulling down rather than pushing up, some by vibrating longitudinally rather than transversally, and some can’t really be done without a whammy bar.

Do you have a best example of whom you’re trying to emulate?

Majorscale

There’s always the David Gilmour approach…. bend up and use the tremolo bar.

ryanverbena

viz said:

I think you’re nearly there, but I wanna say something a bit different. Vibrato is a musical device, not a technique on its own. It exists to do something to the music, to the note, and that thing isn’t (normally) just to give a generic warble or wobble. It could be to make the music sound more aggressive, or to make the note warm up, or to give more romanticism to it, or to amplify the rhythmical aspect of the music, or whatever. Or you could just be using it to overcome innacurate tuning. 

So I’d ask, do you really know in your mind’s ear exactly what you are wanting it to sound like? Can you sing it? Because that will influence greatly how you try to play it. There are loads of different vibrato sounds and you can tell which technique a guitarist uses with your eyes shut. You can even identify some players by their vibrato alone if they stick to one type. For example: do you want to dip below the target note briefly and return (accentuates the rhythm and sounds tragic)? Or oscillate above and below the note (makes it warm and seductive)? Or oscillate above the note only (sounds a bit disconcerting and challenging)? Do you want it fast (increases the energy of the music)? Or slow (dampens the energy)? High amplitude or barely noticeable (affects the aggressiveness of the music)? Start slow and get quicker (sounds panicky and weird)? Start low amplitude and get more pronounced (great for warming up long notes)? Quick when rising and slow when descending? Or vice versa? So many choices - they all sound different and they all create a different mood. When you know exactly what effect you’re trying to do, so that you could sing it, then some of the techniques described by the contributors to this thread will be better for you than others. Some vibrato is best done with a single finger, others with backup fingers shoring up behind, others by pulling down rather than pushing up, some by vibrating longitudinally rather than transversally, and some can’t really be done without a whammy bar.

Do you have a best example of whom you’re trying to emulate?

This is a great way of looking at it - I'd not really thought about discerning between different types, just lumped it into a single skill that I was aspiring to. Now that you say it, and I mention it above, both Knopfler and Kossoff are my heroes in this department and as you say - each of them is VERY different in what they are trying to achieve by adding vibrato to the bend. Kossoff is raw and is really using it to make the guitar scream (especially in live recordings), whereas Knopfler tends to add a more subtle bloom to his bends. 

If I were to pin it on a single bend, one comes to mind. The first note (G bent up a whole step) and subsequent vibrato is "that sound" in my head that I am trying to achieve. The cover below (at 1min 30) shows it up close ,and may be a good starting point for me to emulate technique wise.



Thank you for the advice, i've collated everything useful above onto a single A4 sheet that I'm using to practise from now. Trying to incorporate a lot of these ideas into my approach. 

Although this has taken me a few steps back to re-write some muscle memory and change the way I'm thinking about the bend, I definitely feel fresher going into this and progress now seems on the horizon. I'm going to post a follow up video once I start top get the hang of it. Might inspire others to use this amazing resource we have in the collective wisdom of fellow FB members, to help cross those challenging hurdles 

digitalkettle

Well said @viz …it’s so easy to go on auto pilot.