Have you struggled with bending and it feels really difficult and hard to do?
Can you bend but it often sounds like a dying cat?
In this article, I`m going to show you how to bend with ease and sound good doing it!
We will be covering these topics:
The Basics Of Bending Notes
We are going to be covering the basics of learning how to bend notes.
Bending notes sounds really cool and when you have a guitar its one of the unique things that the guitar can do. It’s the only way we can make piano players jealous. When it comes to bending notes on guitar a lot of people struggle to do it well.
This is due to it being quite a physical task on the instrument.
What usually happens when you first attempt it is that your fingers don’t have the strength to push the notes up and it really hurts on your finger tips. Another thing that often happens is that bending to pitch is very difficult too. You have to learn to how to bend accurately to gain the correct pitch.
There are many different types of bends that a lot of guitarists use but we will focus on the technique to give you and understanding of how to bend accurately.
Bending notes is a technical thing that guitarists can master.
And having the right technique can avoid obtaining injuries.
And ill show you the correct technique which will solve most of those previous issues.
Learning The Right Bending Technique
There are several components that go into bending correctly. Firstly holding the guitar with the left hand if you are right-handed. By that I mean you should be holding it so that the thumb is over the neck and it acts like an anchor point.
What you want to be doing with the wrist of the same hand is having a turning motion like you are opening a door with a door knob. You keep your thumb still but you turn your wrist upwards with the fingers aiming for the thumb that’s hanging over the neck. All of this handles your hand position but now we address the fingers.
When you are learning to bend the best practice is to use all three fingers on the same string like so.
The reason being is that this is to support the finger that is bending as when you first start doing it you wont be that strong enough to bend with just a single finger. We then have the thumb over the neck, technique wise this is one of the exceptions as to when you have your thumb over the neck. This is to help with the wrist turning for things like vibrato and for the bending. All this is the basis for a good foundation when bending notes.
But an issue still remains and that is.
Bending Accurately
After we have learnt the correct technique we need to learn how to bend to the right note which means learning to bend accurately and with purpose. At first when learning to bend, like mentioned before it is difficult because of having enough finger strength to do so. Which is why when you bend for the first time it may sound out of tune or not the note you intended. the good news is that we can practice bending to pitch quite easily. Ill show you an example to follow.
First you pick the note to bend to away from the starting note. In this instance we are bending on the 7th note on the G string.
We are going to only do a half step bend.
Which in this case means one fret. so we play the 8th fret first to get familiar with how it sounds.
The we play the 7th fret and bend to match the note we played until we are correct.
These small bends are useful for finishing of a phrase or adding emphasis to a phrase.
Next we practice bending up two frets or a whole step bend from the 7th fret on the g string to the 9th fret.
We take the same approach as before playing the 9th fret first on the g string.
And then bending the 7th from on the g string up towards the 9th fret, trying to match the pitch.
This is a good way to practice accurate bending.
Bending Notes Across The Strings
You can bend both ways to get the same result! If we take the 7th fret to the 9th fret we can bend upwards and downwards on the g string to get the same pitch.
We can do this because we are on the G string but if we bend on other strings we can be limited by which direction we can bend. Especially on the low and high e string.
This is due to not having enough room to bend in certain directions on the high e or low e. if you push up on the low e youll "fret out" or not sound any notes conversley youll get the same if you pull down on the high e string. You can do bending on other strings in different directions but you have to be more careful on the b string and the a string when going in certain directions all due to space on the guitar to bend and having note clarity.
After The Basics
After learning how to bend properly with these steps there are a lot more bending techniques you can acquire to your arsenal of sounds.
For now, if you have just learnt how to bend, I suggest to stick to the advice in this article.
But for those who are more adventurous you will have to stick around and follow this blog as there will be more articles in the future that will go over the varied techniques of bending.
I hope this article was of some use to you, if you like this type of content and you want to see more just like leave a comment and share! I'd love to hear about any issues or things you are struggling with. See you in the next article!
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