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Chapter 10: Express Yourself: Making the Guitar Sing, Cry, and Wail
185
If you find it difficult to bend by using just one finger, try supporting the bending
finger with another finger behind it (toward the nut). For example, if you
use your third finger to bend, use your second, first, or even both of them to
help push the string. This assistance affords more control and strength and is
especially helpful when bending and vibratoing at the same time.
Playing great bends like it’s nobody’s business
Bends are a great way to add life to an already-sounded note, and they come
in a wide variety of combinations: immediate bends, bends in rhythm, bends
and releases, and pre-bends. You can even have multiple bends and releases
all occurring after just one pick strike. Perhaps most important, though, is
that bending distinguishes blues guitar from classical, folk, or jazz, where
there’s relatively little or no string bending. (Rock guitar has a lot of bending,
but much of rock is derived from the blues.) The following sections all
describe various ways to bend a string.
Albert King, arguably the most influential postwar, electric blues-guitarist
after B.B. King, is widely regarded as the king of string benders. Part of his
readily identifiable technique was facilitated by his playing upside down and
backward, resulting in pulling down, rather than pushing up, to bend strings.
His “Blues Power” from Live Wire/Blues Power (Stax Records) is a virtual
glossary of multiple bends.
Bending in rhythm
Often a bend between two notes occurs in a specified rhythm. This means
that you must control the travel of the bend between two notes, arriving at
the destination note in rhythm — and in tune! Figure 10-12 shows a passage
containing bends with three different variations of rhythms and distances.
Track 61, 0:17
Figure 10-12:
Bending in
rhythm.
5
T 5 7
A 7 B
1/2 1 1/2
5
8 5 8
7 7 5
5
8 5
7 5
7
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