Hi everybody! Welcome to yet another element to help you play guitar solos that can grab your listeners by their necks and demand attention. Now I will talk to you about vibrato. This is one technique that is so much neglected that even many shredders do so poorly at.
So what is a good vibrato and how do we do it on guitar. As a general guide, a good vibrato is deep and wide, in contrast to narrow and shallow ones (think of the sound a goat or a sheep makes). They also need to be in time rather than randomly going high and low in pitch. They can be heard from classical or opera singers.
There are many ways to do it on the guitar and the following two are what I use very often and they can really help you render very rich vibratos.
The Bent-Note Vibrato
This is a really straight forward way of doing it. You only need to strengthen up your muscles and be constantly conscious about the changes in pitches that you make.
If you remember from the previous article on bending notes, considering you are able to do it already, you can actually start from there.
So pick a note, play it using the string-bending technique and hold it. While sustaining the note (a distortion effect will help for this purpose), bend it a little bit further in such a way the pitch goes up by a semitone or half step, and then release the bend so that the pitch goes down a half step lower than the original bent note that you did at the beginning. Now repeat the process for your desired duration and there you go, a very reach vibrato.
Now refine this by using a metronome so as to train yourself to do it uniformly and in time.
Steve Vai's Circular Vibrato
The inventor of this technique describes it as a combination of the 'rock style' vibrato and the 'classical' vibrato.
The former just deals with bending and releasing the string without bending it before hand to leave room for pitch lowering. So it just starts from the target note, going sharp and the back to the target note again. No flat or lowering down.
The latter deals with simply sliding your finger within a fret or position while sustaining the notes which sharpens and flattens the note to some extent.
So when the two is combined it allows you to go sharp and flat.
To sum things up, a good vibrato is a deliberate act of going sharp and flat (vice versa) around a targeted note in successions to make a note more emotional or tense.
If you combine these techniques with the other techniques that have been discussed, you will sound like a 'pro' even if you don't shred.
