Want to make your guitar licks and solos sound more expressive using bending technique?
Learning advanced string bending approaches makes your guitar playing sound incredibly expressive, creative and captivating.
Good news:
These concepts are easy to pick up on and learn in no time.
Once you master advanced guitar bends you gain a powerful tool for making your solos sound consistently impressive.
Watch this video to learn how to master advanced string bending technique:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
Click on the video to begin watching it.
Use the ideas below to make your playing sound even more musically expressive and interesting:
Play Guitar Vibrato That Stays In Tune Consistently
Keeping your vibrato in tune is important for making your bends sound great.
Here is what it means to stay in tune:
When you bend the string up to reach the target pitch (during vibrato), always release it back to the original pitch you began on. This makes it sound like it is controlled and smooth.
Practice this each day for just a few minutes using the following approach:
Set a metronome to a slow tempo.
Bend the string up on beat one.
Release it down on beat two.
Repeat this continually while focusing on keeping the vibrato in tune and controlled.
Use Different Types Of Vibrato To Enhance Your Bends Even More
It's true:
There are many different types of vibrato.
Many guitarists use the exact same style of vibrato they are used to every time they play. This eventually becomes boring over time.
What types of vibrato are there?
Here are a couple of types of vibrato to try out now:
Wide and fast: Wide vibrato means the distance from the original pitch to the target pitch is a whole step or more. Wide vibrato that is performed fast adds incredible intensity into your licks and solos. Use it to release a lot of tension during an important part of any lick or solo.
Narrow and medium: Narrow vibrato is no more than a half step in distance from the original pitch to the target pitch. Using this combine with a medium speed of application is great for a smooth, more subtle approach. This is a great all-around approach to use at any point during your licks and solos.
Note: Make sure not to overdo vibrato while playing! As with any technique, overdoing it takes away its novelty very quickly.
Make Your Bends Even Better Using Vibrato
Bends sound very expressive when you enhance them with vibrato!
This skill is critical for any player who wants to make the notes in their licks cry out with tons of passion.
As you are bending a string, apply vibrato to the string at the highest point of the bend (when you have reached the target note). Keep in mind that this requires extra care to keep everything in tune - so pay close attention.
You can even add other techiques into the mix for an even cooler sound.
For example:
It sounds cool and is actually less difficult to bend a string when you use your picking hand tapping finger to apply vibrato and your fretting hand finger to apply the pressure to keep the note sounding. While beginning with using vibrato on your bends, use a narrow variation until it is easy before moving on to wider intervals.
This cool mix of techniques helps make your guitar playing sound very unique and expressive like never before.
Again - Don't forget to use everything in moderation.
Even something as interesting as using tapping with vibrato can easily become repetitive and dull if you use it too much within a single phrase, solo or lick. At first, use it to accent the first or last note in a given guitar part.
Then slowly integrate it into your overall lead guitar playing until it feels totally natural.
Want to learn more ways to get better at bending and vibrato? Finding a guitar teacher is the best way to do it.
You'll be glad you did.
Here is what my students got from taking guitar lessons:
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
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... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
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When I started learning from Tom, the main thing that made him different from other teachers was that he was showing me how to excel in all aspects of my guitar playing by applying the skills that I already knew together with the new material that I was learning from him.
He made me aware of both strengths and weaknesses in my playing that I did not even know I had. From there he gave me the knowledge, tools and guidance to literally transform my guitar playing by enabling me to overcome things that were preventing me from becoming a truly creative and self-expressive guitar player. These were the kinds of things that none of my previous guitar teachers and books I studied were able to do for me.
After Tom made me aware of all the things I was missing in my guitar playing and provided me with the strategy and tools for solving them, I began to make very fast progress in all areas of my guitar playing.
I can now write my own music and can create lead guitar solos that I am happy and fulfilled with. I also have the technical skills to confidently and easily play anything that I want to express. I have overcome all of the lead guitar challenges that I struggled with before, and increased my guitar speed to virtuoso levels. More importantly, I have the knowledge and understanding of how to continually improve my guitar playing and musical skills to higher and higher levels to continue expressing myself with my music. Overall, I have definitely transformed in a huge way as a musician and as a person through my lessons with Tom Hess. I am grateful to him for guiding me towards becoming the guitarist I always wanted to be!"
Mike Philippov, Indiana, USA
“Before I took lessons with Tom Hess, I wanted to learn how to do some sweep picking and I also wanted to fill in a few gaps that I thought I might’ve had in my playing. And also I was feeling a little bit frustrated with not knowing where to take my playing. I didn’t really know how to get better. I felt like I reached a plateau, so that’s why I sought out Tom.”
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I’ve had a few other guitar teachers before I took lessons with Tom, and most of them weren’t very good. And after reading a few articles online that Tom had written, I could tell that this guy was going to be the teacher for me.
The biggest thing that I really like is the actual guitar lessons themselves. I’m finding that I’m learning new things that I never even considered every single time I get a lesson. Something new to apply to my playing each time. But of course, I really enjoy the forum as well, because thanks to the lessons with Tom, I’ve been able to meet people from all over the world who have similar experiences and similar goals, so that’s been really motivating as well.
Before I took lessons with Tom I really didn’t like improvisation. I knew scales, and I knew kind of how they applied over chord progressions, but I just didn’t like it. Since taking lessons with Tom, some of the lessons are focused on that specific issue, and now I feel really comfortable about getting up in front of people and playing over any type of… in any key any backing track, I feel pretty comfortable doing that.
Tom actually knows what my goals are and gives me specific lessons that will help me achieve those goals. Other teachers that I’ve had before just do it their way… it’s either their way or the highway. And they don’t really care about what I wanted to do, and they didn’t really listen, and they didn’t really look into what I was doing or what my interests were and didn’t really play into that.
It’s really motivating to get to know people who are also students of Tom. It’s really good to have positive-minded musicians around even if I’m just talking to them online, or if I meet them in person, either way it’s still really motivating.
The forum has helped me because I am able to ask any music theory related questions or technique questions and I get those answered very very quickly. And I also like to participate in discussions and help share my knowledge as well with other people, which when I do that I feel that it’s reinforcing the things that I know as well, so it helps with my music theory knowledge when I share as well.
Greg Trotter, Melbourne, Australia
You know how to play better guitar solos and licks using great bending technique. Now it's time to become the best lead guitar player in town. Let me help you do it - get started today with guitar lessons online.