Bend (guitar)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A bend is a musical technique that involves "bending" the tone upwards or downwards, thus making the tone sound higher or lower than normal.
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[edit] Basic technique
To produce a bend the guitarist puts a finger on the string and then, while pressing the string down on the fret, strikes a tone, and pushes the string either up or down. This has the effect of stretching the string and thus makes its pitch higher. Generally a bend on the 1st-3rd strings will go "up" as seen from the guitarist's point of view and a bend on the 4th-6th will go "down". The technique can also be used with distortion to make "screams".
Bending is usually limited to 1-2 semitones, rarely a bit more and involves overstressing the string which could lead to string breakage.
[edit] Advanced varieties
- Backward, reverse or release bend involves pressing the string on the fret, pulling it up to stretch the string first, and then striking the string. This causes the note to go flat, the reverse direction of straight bend.
- Several strings can be bent at once.
- Innumerable bend patterns exist: for example, straight bending of a string 2 semitones up, then 1 semitone down, then 1 up, then 2 down.
[edit] Difficulties
- The most difficult moment for beginners practicing bends is getting the note bent to proper pitch. Usually the bend changes note pitch exactly by 1 semitone or 1 whole tone (2 semitones), and most beginners fail to bend a string exactly to proper pitch, producing overbends and underbends. Most guitar teachers advise playing the target note on a higher fret, listening closely to its sound and trying to bend the string aiming to get exactly the same pitch.
- Bending (especially heavy bending, more than 1 semitone) usually involves touching more than 1 string with a left (fretting) hand, as seen in the illustration. Usually, making a heavy bend with just one finger is considered bad practice: one bent string will touch the adjacent one, the adjacent one will also produce some sort of unwanted tone that will result in an overall muddy sound. Thus, while bending one string, it is usually necessary to hold and bend (without striking) one or two adjacent strings in the direction of bend. The picture shows a guitarist bending a string with the ring finger while simultaneously holding and bending two upper strings with the middle finger.
[edit] Sound
- Bend-release (file info) — play in browser (beta)
- A note is pre-bent up 1 semitone, then bent back, followed with a 1-tone pull down and hand vibrato.
- Problems listening to the file? See media help.
