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34 Part I: You Got a Right to Play the Blues TEAM LinG
The neck is shallower.
The fingerboard width is thinner.
The strings are lighter than those found on an acoustic.
The action, or distance from the strings to the frets, is lower, so it frets
almost effortlessly.
But the lighter strings have another advantage crucial to blues playing, other
than being easier to play: They’re easier to bend.
Bending strings allows electric guitarists to be more expressive in their
lead playing, and to allow the guitar to better emulate the vocal stylings of
blues singers, who used their flexible approach to pitch to play blues notes.
Figure 2-6 shows what it looks like to bend a string on an electric. The string
is physically pushed sideways on the fretboard by the left hand, stretching it.
Figure 2-6:
A left-hand
string bend
stretches
the string,
causing it to
rise in pitch.
Getting your sounds to be loud and lingering
The primary reason that everyone grabbed electric guitars was for amplification.
Electric guitars could be electronically amplified, making the sound
heard over the rest of the band, and offering the player a more controllable
solution than placing a microphone on an acoustic guitar.