Guitar Lab: Bending with Style

Bending With Style

This course is designed to examine various components of string bending which will increase your vocabulary and technical skills thus allowing you to play much more expressively in a vocal manner through the use of string pitch manipulation. You will receive 6 jam tracks in this course. One will strictly be bass and drums, 4 of them will include rhythm guitar supporting various harmonic approaches, and one jam track which has a solo. This course will stay exclusively on the 3rd string in the key of C through various scales including minor pentatonic, blues scale, Dorian mode, blues composite, and half-step whole step diminished. You will apply various techniques of the fretting hand including hammer ons, pull offs, legato slides, bends, releases, and pre-bends. You will also use just your right hand fingers to allow for greater tonal variation in dynamic approaches. The 10 examples will demonstrate various rhythmic approaches for a bend in release which will increase your expressiveness in your vibrato. You will learn how to keep the string ringing through left hand manipulation which will give a more vocal sound to your playing.

Playing Dry

We will start with just playing one note dry which means no pitch manipulation. This note will be the root of our tonal center, a C in the 5th fret of the 3rd string. Your goal is not only to play this note in tune but to keep it ringing by proper manipulation between the string in the fret. You will also be instructed as how to dampen with your picking hand. This is important because throughout this course you will be sustaining notes and a come a point where your whispering through the guitar instead of speaking loudly. This is where dampening is important because the threshold of your sound will be down where your noise floor is with adjacent string issues.

Minor 2nd Moves Pt. 1

In example 2 your goal is to keep the C and D flat notes ringing through the use of legato slides throughout a two measure phrase. This example will be the model throughout all the remaining examples for your string bending in terms of pitch selection and therefore you will be using jam track number 1 which supports this root to flat 9 move.

Minor 2nd Moves Pt. 2

Example 3 applies a bend and release technique of the fretting hand to the pictures and rhythm of example 2. The legato slides of example two establish a pitch model for you of the C and D flat notes which you will then target with these bends and releases. I suggest going back and forth playing example two followed by example 3 to make sure that you are nailing these pitches.

Minor 2nd Moves Pt. 3

Example 4 applies a dotted 1/8, dotted 1/8, 1/8 note rhythm in a two beat figure. In the video explain the concept of swing 16th notes so be sure to listen to that explanation. Again I suggest playing this example would legato slides to establish a pitch model and then play it with bends and releases.

Minor 2nd Moves Pt. 4

Example 5 can be played various ways in terms of the speed of your bend up to the D flat. But if you play the bend to slowly you will not establish the dotted 8th to 16th note rhythm. Be sure to listen closely to how I demonstrate this.

Minor 2nd Moves Pt. 5

Example 6 applies an 8th note triplet feel to the C and D flat notes. Playing this figure over the groove presents another layer of rhythm. This is a powerful tool when soloing so be sure to grasp this concept and get it in your ear.

Intensive Examination of Bending

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