Guitar Bending Tricks: Do's & Dont's AND Common Mistakes To Avoid

foreign bending is rotation today we're going to talk about your bends and how to properly execute them without hurting your hands so you can sound like a pro whether you're into John Mayer BB King and Jimi Hendrix or John Petrucci Stephen Toronto and Jason Richardson all of these players execute their bands virtually the exact same way I'm going to show you the secret behind all these players and how they use mechanical advantage instead of finger strength to control their bends precisely and with ease plus once you get into working on your bands you're going to run into a couple questions and that's why I'm including a little FAQ section at the end here if you've been working on your bends for a while and you've been trying to follow their videos and you've been hurting your wrist or your fingers I want you to stop and watch this video because before I wrote this one I did a lot of research and I saw it was out there and it wasn't pretty the other videos I watched completely failed to talk about any of the biomechanics involved with performing bends easily they failed to talk about the difference between bending up and bending down and they failed to answer many of the common issues people run into offending like how do I avoid access only sounding other strings when releasing a bend and all that's going to change today today I'm going to give you a progressive exercise that you can use to develop your bands from Zero to Hero with control in just three minutes a day I'm going to show you the right way to perform ends eliminate pain in your wrists and fingers mine's little break-in period and armed with this technique you're going to be able to bend all day long with no issues after today no more slipping strings no more bends sounding like you're vigorously shaking a wet cat if you're looking for a shortcut to make your bend sound great this is it by the way if you like these kinds of videos and breakdowns go ahead and hit the like And subscribe button and maybe even leave a comment on the video really helps me out last thing before you started even if you're an experienced vendor I still want you to watch this video and come with an open mind because you might learn something new something you don't know just because you've been doing it for a long time or it came naturally doesn't mean you're truly doing it in the best way okay with all that out of the way let's get into it so here's the big idea with this video string bending is rotation not pushing and pulling what do I mean by that well when you're playing guitar there's really two hand positions that you need to know and the first one is the classical hand position which is great and very useful for a lot of things but it's not the focus of today's lesson the classical position is characterized by the middle of the thumb on the back of the neck and an open space between where the fingers wrap around the neck and here I've also got the second little camera GoPro hello the second hand position I just call the blues position and it's frequently seen in more casual and blues styles of guitar playing the blues position is characterized by wrapping your thumb all the way around and closing most if not all of the space between the skin of your thumb and the back of your neck and the index finger on the guitar now before you click off on this video and you go well I already wrapped my thumb around the guitar I'm doing this the correct way the mechanical advantage that I'm talking about does not come solely from wrapping your thumb around the back of the guitar that's really a secondary result of doing this technique so let me show you what happens when we try to perform bends with the classical technique foreign [Applause] [Music] the result is bends that take a lot of finger strength they lack character and they lack control I mean you even saw in that example it has bump in the other string another thing I want you to notice is that in the classical position the fingers generally sit perpendicular to the guitar neck and that means that they are parallel with the Frets just like this so parallel to the neck perpendicular with the Frets okay so now I'm going to switch over to the blues position and watch first and then I'm going to break things down [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] yeah so why does that band sound and work so much better like I said earlier it actually is almost nothing to do with wrapping the thumb around in fact you don't even need the thumb to do this I'll then one [Applause] the key is that in the Blues position we have a mechanical advantage for bending the strings take a close look at where the knuckle of my first finger is relative to the guitar neck it's anchored right along the side here versus in the classical position my hand is just free floating and I have to pull and push the string to get the same result [Music] so let's break that down just a little bit further first and most importantly is that your Bend is anchored like I said earlier at the knuckle of that first finger second the thumb is bending or wrapped around the neck but it only bends reactively so watch as I perform just a first finger and then a fourth finger Bend coming to the side like this and then with a fourth finger one where there's somewhat a little bit of more squeezing involved it's doing a little bit of like pressing a button and it's this position that's the key to forming effortless bends with maximum control now I know that all that's probably a lot to remember so here is the easy way to think about it I want you to think about your first finger we're going to start with first finger being a fish hook just make this little hook kind of thing and all you're going to do is reach it out and it's like you're rotating a doorknob that's it that's the whole motion now when you've got it on the guitar it's anchored right here and so now you can see that my wrist moves around that point on my wrist so if you're doing this correctly what you're going to see on the guitar is that your third and fourth fingers are wrapping around that point and I'll demo once again very exaggerated with first finger on the guitar [Music] no thumb [Music] with the thumb [Music] [Applause] [Music] now let's talk about where exactly on the fingers these bends happen because trying to do it on the tips of your fingers will only result in the strings slipping out from under you [Music] so what you can do is you can take the tip of your finger and you can divide it into a couple different sections the first way we're going to do it is horizontally on just this last section of the finger so this first section I just call it the zero it's flat it's used when you're playing bar chords the third section I call the 90 and that's the very tip of your finger imagine a line coming out of the top of your finger and then there's the 45 which is the spot right in between those two points so now that you have that in your head I want you to do some other divisions on your finger and you're going to take your finger and you're going to divide the finger right in half so there's a line right down the middle and then you're going to draw a line to the left and the right end of that splitting the finger basically into quarters but I really think about it as just being in thirds because you can play on these imaginary lines so wherever the 45 degree meets the outside of the finger that is where you're going to position the string and the reason that we do that is because if you try to play it on the tip and at flat flat it doesn't work at the tip it's going to slip out from under you but if it's off to the side and it's at the 45 on your finger then you've got all of this grip strength because of where the string is sitting on your finger instead of trying to just press down harder in order to get more control of the string so with the whole technique demystified with the fish hook and where exactly to place it on your finger I want to show you that even players who are known for being super technical do their bends this way this is how Steven Toronto does it oh this is how Petrucci does it [Music] this is even how Jason Richardson does it and this is the same even if you cross into that Blues world and you look at Players like John Mayer [Music] foreign [Music] or BB King [Music] in every single one of those clips the hand is anchored to the neck pretty much via the first finger so with all that out of the way let's talk about how we can put this into practice with a progressive exercise that'll help you develop your bends from Zero to Hero but before I show you this exercise there's some quick vocab we need to get out of the way and it's vocab that didn't really make sense for me to explain until just now that vocab is simply called up bends and down bends when I'm talking about bending up and bending down I don't mean the pitch direction of the bend and I'm not talking about pre-bending either I'm simply talking about the direction that you perform the bend in on the guitar and up Bend is when you bend the string towards the roof and it's down Bend is when you bend the string towards the floor please [Music] and here's a little rule that's going to help guide virtually every single Bend you do from now until the end of time for the top three strings you're going to bend towards the roof and for the bottom three strings you're going to bend towards the floor great caveat to this rule is that you can frequently getting away with doing down bends on the G string because there just so happens to be enough space and the physics of the string size and all that and the reason we do this is so that we don't run out of next space while performing our bends for example or here's an example on the B string [Music] doesn't sound so good so with all that out of the way now we're going to talk about how to train your bends now we're going to start with how to train your down bends first because they're a lot easier and I want you to give this seven days of consistent practice than if it's feeling comfortable move on to doing up bends so here's how this works you're gonna grab a timer and you're gonna set it for one minute and then you're gonna grab metronome and you're gonna set that to exactly 60 BPM and you're going to set your finger use your first finger on some kind of mid low fret maybe around five to seven and I like using clean tone for this like a lot of things so I can tell very specifically what's going on and then you're going to bend a half Step Up only if you don't know what that kind of sounds like and you want to get that sound in your ear just play it before you bend up to it [Music] and then we're going to practice eighth notes triplets sixteenths and then crazy so let me show you how that goes now [Music] and then you're just going to go through and do it on the rest of your fingers a quick note is that you're primarily going to end up doing these on your second and third fingers in practice but I like the versatility of feeling really comfortable my first second third and fourth fingers so train your up ends you're gonna do the exact same thing set a timer for one minute set your metronome to 60 BPM first finger on some mid low fret on the G string and then you're going to practice bending up instead of bending down and you're gonna do it with the same subdivisions and that's it that's the whole exercise it's going to make you really great at Bends really fast so you're going to find that after a few days of practicing this exercise your hand will start to default to this technique when you're playing music at least that's the experience I had when playing two various solos and things so if this simple exercise is already creating breakthroughs and hope that your bends can sound good I want you to go ahead and leave a comment below tell me how it's going one last note is please don't do this exercise without a metronome it's not an option here every metronome there's a gazillion of them they're free you can go on the internet the metronome is crucial for this exercise to work because of the different levels of subdivisions and they're going to give you a guide for rhythmic control not every solo is going to need crazy vibrato right off the bat so if you don't know where to get your metronome you can go to Google you can hit metronome and they've got one there or if you want to get an app or something I really like the time Guru app or tonal energy but sometimes having a physical unit is really useful too I like my boss db60 it is a little bit more of an expensive metronome but what you can do I'll show it over here is you can press the memory button and it'll let you quickly flip through all of your saved presets I'm sure this problem would be solved with like a little wheel metronome but I like this one once you have half steps mastered with this on down bends and up bends you can go ahead and experiment with doing whole step bends as well on this exercise foreign [Music] the primary factor this comes down to is how your hand is anchored to the guitar and where exactly the string sits on your finger now as you do this you might experience a little bit of pain so let's take a second here to talk about good pain and bad pain bad pain is any kind of sharp or stinging pain and that's usually a sign that you're doing something wrong but any sort of dull or fatigue based pain generally means that you're just training new muscles when you bend the string you're applying a lot of force through your fingers as the strings will press in so stick with it and you'll get used to it like you can even see right now there's a little bit of an indent on my finger but that's just part of playing guitar after all we're only doing this for four minutes a day foreign so now let's talk about some FAQs and odds and ends that you're going to run into with these bins and the first thing I want to say because it's probably one of the most important things that when it comes to bends is the top three strings pretty much top three top two should be bent up and any of the bottom three strings should be bent down and of course there are exceptions you can find when playing music but I don't want you to worry about doing it right just take your time and use that rule as kind of the guide to figure out what's best for that passage next question is are there any drawbacks to using this kind of position all the time the the blues position and there's lots of players who primarily use that position but it can make certain riffs and chords harder to play so I have all of my students learn the classical type position and then we introduce this Blues position with the uh with this exercise with the bends but pretty much any player out there who's super high level is going to have a pretty high degree of Mastery over both of these and what it really comes down to is which one's better for you and it depends on what kind of music you're playing like I play a lot of Dream Theater a lot of like Prague kind of stuff where sometimes I'm going between both of those and other people like playing Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Mayer all the time and a lot of that stuff is going to be specifically thumb wrapped around the neck so here's a quick example of a little excerpt where I'm kind of switching between the more classical position and the blues position and this is from illumination Theory and it's the final solo [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh and I want to add some additional Clarity on should my fingers hurt and it depends where if you're playing an electric guitar you aren't really going to develop super significant calluses but if your hands are soft as a baby's bum you can expect a little more discomfort and if you have pain in your elbow or your wrist you're probably not doing this right the wrist is slightly bent in the fish hook and it's sort of rotating around it's not perfectly flat but it's also not overextended or reversed like this now doing bends on acoustic guitar is a lot more difficult so if you have an electric guitar I would highly recommend starting on that next question is should my fingers collapse when I'm doing bends and generally speaking no your fingers shouldn't collapse a lot of that rotation happens because we have that little bit of space in the arch of our finger if you're collapsing your finger while you're doing this you're going to run into a lot of easy sounding on other strings after after the next thing that you're going to run into is as you're practicing with fingers one two three four is you're going to see that there are different levels of rotation that you actually get on the different fingers so I'll just demo some up bends with my hand soap [Music] thank you the key that you should really look for is is this part of your hand rotating out when you're adding more fingers sometimes especially if you're doing a very large Bend like a minor third there can be a little bit of finger extension or a little bit of finger pulling to get that last little bit out but generally it's not needed this is something you'll see especially on the low strings because in order to get that whole fatter string to really move you might need to move it a little bit further to get the same pitch The Fish Hook is really what enables the rotation to make this technique happen next up is my bends always sound Out Of Tune how do I work on this do with metronome played it up before of course and then Target that tone with your Bend [Music] not a cheat to get out of this because there are going to be some situations where you're going to want to be right on with your Bend like this one [Music] in a Solo I'm working on right now or there might be other situations where a big vibrato on the note that you're landing on makes a lot of sense does string gauge matter and I would say yes it does but it's not the most important thing many guitars are set up from the factory and even designed like this guitar is designed with the nut to be played with 10 to 46 gauge strings I know a lot of pro players like nines and I also know that Rick beato made a video apparently thinner strings sound better I haven't really watched the video and I haven't tried knives on this but the big deal with the string gauge thing is that thinner strings will have a lower tension so they're easier to move sideways than thicker strings are next step is does my guitar setup matter and yes the guitar setup matters a lot for your bends some players like I believe Paul Gilbert prefers really high but other people prefer theirs really low I'm one of the low action players but if you do have higher action there's going to be more pressure needed to press the string down first and then to the side so if your guitar isn't set up well I would recommend looking into that tomens guitars and basses channel is a really great channel for learning how to set up your guitar next up is if you're bumping strings on the release of the bend like this [Music] [Applause] what do you do to fix that and there's really two things that you need to do number one is you can try changing the sort of angle of attack of your fingers so that you're not grabbing that string in the first place if the string is under kind of one of the more Central pressure points on your finger then that string is going to stick but if the if the string is just outside of that then the string is not going to stick and the second thing that you need to do is really control your right hand muting I'm going to do a whole separate video on that so that that string isn't sounding on the release even if you did end up grabbing a little bit with your left hand now with that in mind with the whole muting thing in mind when you bend a string you're moving that string over to where the next string is down so like if I bend uh on the B string fret uh 15 and I bend it all the way up what we've done is we've really changed the angle right here so that these strings are closer together and so we need to rotate our hand less actually we don't need to mute as much so that we're out of the way and we don't accidentally kill the note that we're bending up to [Music] it's a very very very fine space regarding how much you roll your hand over and if you're going to stop that string or not so just experiment with it and you'll find over time your hand will get dialed into your guitar and your setup and you won't mute things when you release them but that's that's the best two tips I have on it is don't grab it with the other finger you can try rolling off a little bit and make sure you're getting the proper amount of muting with your right hand next up you might look at Players out there like a video like Steve Vice candle power and you go well he's bending with his fingers and that's how I do it so it must be correct and sure if you want to fatigue your fingers by trying to do this motion all the time please be my guest but if you watch any one of his other videos you're gonna see that he pretty much bends with the same kind of motion I've been talking about this whole video and if you do watch his videos make sure you distinguish between his sort of circular vibrato and an actual large pitch Bend of a minor second or a major second a whole step or half step and the last little addendum I want to put on this video is a mention for what I call body weight bends and these are bends that are performed against the weight of the guitar or the inertial resistance and generally these are for very quick bends and 99 of the time these will be up bends and they'll be half steps sometimes they might be on the lower strings okay something like that so what we're doing here is we're not pushing and pulling with the fingers what we're actually doing is we're locking the fingers in place and then we're just pushing that against the body of the guitar so the little example I have for this is I'm working on the a place in your world solo from flying colors and it opens with this Bend [Music] if I do it with my first finger I'm not going to get the notes same with second I could do it but it's weird third finger [Applause] then I've got this kind of weird interval so I've chosen to do that bend with my fourth finger and I if I wrap my thumb all the way I lose almost a little bit of Mobility because this is just so far up the neck so I've got my finger you might see my thumb pop around a little bit but I've actually got that classical position space in here when I'm doing that Ben [Music] so let's recap everything that we've gone over today string bending is done with rotation not with pushing and pulling please do yourself a favor and we're going to perform our bends using the fish hook technique and then we're going to practice our down bends and our bends with the metronome for one minute each per finger so one minute one minute one minute one minute and then the same way other way around [Music] and once you have got all of that mastered go and do it on other strings try it in other places on the fretboard and get really familiar with your bends and with your guitar playing these in tune is the mark of a very skilled player so I really hope this video helped you out with your bends because this was a technique I kind of did wrong for months or even years before I was shown how to do it correctly and if you like this video and you want me to make more go ahead and hit like And subscribe it helps me out helps me know that you liked the video it's the best feedback mechanism and leave a comment if you feel like I left anything out with this video and I'll try to reply to it or let me know what you want to see next and that's all I got for you today so all right peace go practice your bins practice the metronome I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Matt Wright Music

Views: 61,784

Keywords: guitar bends lesson, guitar bends, guitar bending, how to bend guitar strings, string bending, how to bend guitar, string bending technique guitar, guitar bending lesson, string bending technique, guitar bending tips, guitar bending exercises, bending lesson, string bending guitar, bending strings guitar, guitar bending tricks, guitar string bending technique, string bend, bending notes on guitar, string bending electric guitar, guitar string bending tips, youtube, tutorial

Id: vtoK5YsQ_uU

Length: 25min 26sec (1526 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023