Hello once again everyone and welcome back!
As the title of this article goes, now we'll look into one of the ways you can make simple melodies sound cool and fresh on the guitar. The guitar really is a unique instrument as I have said in one of my earlier articles. And one of the unique advantages of the guitar is string-bending (or note-bending).
Its concept is very simple really. It is simply hitting a note from another note which is lower than itself. Did you get that?
Well to make things even simpler let's take an example: Let's say you want to play a single prolonged note on the 7th fret of the 3rd string (which is a D note). Now actually try it right now.
It's boring right? But if you try it again but this time fretting on the 5th fret of that same string and bending the string until you hear that D note perfectly, you would have made a single boring note sound so interesting. It's as if your guitar is begging for more!
But before you get too excited, there is a right way of doing this and you're going to need a little bit of muscle strength to do this perfectly.
To do this, use two or more fretting fingers instead of just one. In my case I am fond of using my middle finger and I put my index finger behind it (away from the body of your guitar) to help push the string upwards so that it bends and hits my target note. And also your thumb needs to be wrapped around the back of the neck so that it touches (not fretting) the low E string for a better leverage.
As an exercise dedicate maybe 5 minutes of your practice time for this: Try bending all of the six strings on any fret you like (you can try every fret). And another challenge is that you can bend it not only from two frets below but up to five.
You might break strings more often by doing this. But that's ok, it is a cheap price to pay for very useful guitar skill isn't it?
PS Once you get comfortable with the string bending, apply it on any melodic passage that you know. Use it so you don't lose it.
