These Exercises Help You Play Guitar Licks With Kickass Vibrato
by Tom Hess
Want to play guitar licks that sound impressive and memorable?
Good news:
It’s not that hard when you use excellent vibrato technique.
Here are a few easy exercises to apply into your playing today to play lead guitar like never before:
Improve Your Vibrato Technique Using A Rapid-Fire Practice Approach
Vibrato technique is used by many guitarists, but not often practiced in an effective way. In fact, some guitarists never even consider practicing it.
Good news is:
Improving your vibrato guitar technique takes only a few minutes a day.
This is done by merely practicing adding vibrato to each note of a given guitar exercise.
Pay attention to making every vibrato perfectly tuned while adding the technique to each note.
Repeat this for several minutes while using every feasible combination of fingers to play the notes. This helps you establish excellent vibrato for all your fingers, not just your index or middle fingers (the absolute most typically used fingers for playing vibrato).
Work On Adding Vibrato To Every Final Note
Adding vibrato at the very end of your musical motif gives it more power and emotional articulation. This ends your metal guitar licks like a gunshot, leaving listeners impressed.
Play your guitar phrase by adding vibrato to whatever notes you want, but make sure to hold the very last note of the idea for a second longer before adding the vibrato.
This makes a substantial difference in the amount of expression produced.
This is the initial step towards using vibrato guitar technique to emotionally boost any metal lick.
Make Bends More Intense Using Vibrato Technique
Adding vibrato to your bends gives them added life) - which makes them sound much more powerful and emotional. This technique is a must for playing mind-blowing metal guitar solos that demand to be heard!
Alternate using a bend with and without vibrato applied at the peak.
The difference in emotional expression is immense!
Understand: it may take you a bit to get great using this strategy.
Make this a top priority in your practice to learn it quickly and begin playing emotive and badass metal guitar solos.
Lastly, it is essential to know that you do not need to apply vibrato immediately to each note you play. This is something many guitarists never consider (making it worth repeating several times).
Knowing this basic idea already puts you miles ahead of most guitarists.
As an alternative to adding vibrato the moment you pick a string, you also have the choice to delay the application of vibrato.
This is performed so:
Attack the string for the note you are fretting and allow it ring for a second or two.
After a second, use the vibrato. This small delay builds a sense of expectancy that makes the vibrato much more powerful!
Express Specific Emotions Using Different Kinds Of Vibrato
Using the exact same kind of approach to playing vibrato every time becomes monotonous eventually.
It's critical to have the power to mix it up when soloing and adjust based on various musical circumstances.
The following are some samples of different styles of vibrato and concepts for when to use them:
Use vibrato that is either a half or full step wide and is applied at a fast rate.
This creates tons of emotional power to a phrase.
This is also great when you want to resolve the tension accumulated by a fast metal guitar lick on a note that is sustained several measures.
Make your vibrato slow and narrow in its scope.
This is generally applied by merely fretting a note and moving your finger side to side inside the fret. This is awesome for slow or quiet parts of a guitar phrase.
Use each type of vibrato while working on the approach above to quickly master the power to express yourself using this technique.
Discover more about how to play great vibrato to boost your metal guitar playing by checking out this article about how to play cool pentatonic guitar licks.
About Tom Hess: Tom Hess is a guitar teacher, music career mentor and guitar teacher trainer. He teaches rock guitar lessons online to students from all over the world and conducts instructional live guitar training events attended by musicians from over 50 countries.
