How to Add Vibrato to a String Bend in Two Steps

Adding vibrato to your string bends is a brilliant way to improve the sound of your bends and your playing overall. It's a great way to round off a lick, and it's a real sign you've moved on from the intermediate level. But it's not an easy thing to get the hang of.

So here are two tips for it. They're very different, and one might help you more than the other, but try both, because they help in different ways. First, though, we need to check you're bending properly.

Bend from the wrist, not the fingers ▶ 0:38

You want to bend by turning the wrist, not by extending the fingers. When I bend a note, I bend quickly, straight to the pitch, rather than creeping up to it. That speed and control comes from a turn of the wrist.

To make that work you need tension in the fingertips. If there's no tension in your fingers, you'll turn your wrist but the fingers will just flop under the pressure of the string. So lock the fingers, then crank the wrist.

Anchor the hand with the base of your first finger on the underside of the neck and the side of the thumb over the top. Then turn the wrist, and think about bringing the base of your palm towards the neck of the guitar.

If you're not bending like this, adding vibrato on top is going to be tricky. So get this sorted first.

Tip one: bend to pitch, push a little above, come back ▶ 1:41

Bend up to pitch and make a mental note, and a visual one, of where you've taken the string. In my example I'm bending the 15th fret on the B string up to the pitch of the 17th fret.

e|-----------|
B|--15b(17)--|
G|-----------|
D|-----------|
A|-----------|
E|-----------|

Visually, my bent string ends up roughly at a particular spot on the inlay. If you don't have a fancy inlay, just look at where the string sits relative to a fret dot. It's only a marker for you, and you don't have to use one.

Now, bend to pitch, then bend a tiny bit further and bring it back to that pitch. Up to the pitch, slightly above, slightly back.

If you play the 17th fret on its own and add normal vibrato, the note goes slightly sharp and comes back. That's the sound you're mimicking with the bend. If you play the fretted note and then the bend, you can check your target pitch by ear, or check it with a tuner if you're not sure.

The main mistake: dropping too far back ▶ 3:28

When you let the bend come back, the string pushes against you, and you'll probably go further back than you want. You end up flat. It's the main mistake a lot of people make.

So keep a bit of tension pushing upwards as you let the string come back. You want to guide it back to the pitch, rather than just letting the string push you down.

Then build it up:

1. One push above the pitch and back.
2. Two in a row.
3. Three, then four.
4. Then start to speed it up.

The more you can do in a row and the faster they get, the more it leans into a proper vibrato sound.

Tip two: go really wide first ▶ 4:01

This one takes things the other way. When I start teaching bend vibrato, I notice students try to be far too precise in their first few attempts. So do the opposite. Go really wide with the vibrato, a bit ridiculously wide on purpose.

Bend up to pitch and move the note up and down a lot, with quite a wide range. Just get the hang of moving it evenly. Then start to speed it up a little.

The point is to train the movement and get used to controlling it. It takes a lot more effort to push upwards to the higher pitch, and on the way back down it's very easy to drop too far, because the string is pushing you. So you're learning to control a nice wide range of motion first.

From there, start to rein it in a little, bringing it closer to that 17th fret pitch.

Expect it to sound awful for a while

You're going to have quite a lot of attempts that just sound awful. That's part of the process, so don't worry if it doesn't sound fantastic straight away.

I think the wide vibrato tip is potentially the more useful one, but the first is really useful for making sure you can control the string while it's under tension. Spend a few minutes on each: wide and even first, then small pushes above the pitch, and see how far you can rein the wide one in before it falls apart.