Guitar Technique: String Bending

Wednesday, 10th June 2009

The last lesson we learned how to do hammer-ons and pull-offs, which are essential techniques you need to learn and master. I am going to show you and explain, yet another guitar technique that is essential in your playing.

The next guitar technique we are going to learn is string bending. Like the hammer-on and pull-offs this technique is very simple to do, but it does require you to have good finger strength. If you are just beginning, then this guitar technique could be a little difficult at first until you build up the required strength to successfully achieve string bending.

What exactly is a string bend?

A string bend is when you place your finger down on the string and a fret of your choice, and then bend the string either up towards you or down towards the floor.
By bending the string, it creates the pitch of the note fretted to either go up in pitch or down in pitch.
This pitch will be determined on how far you bend up the note or bend the note down in pitch.

Also, on an electric guitar you can bend up to 2 whole tones, but on an acoustic guitar, it’s really hard to achieve a bend of 2 whole tones.

Let’s take a look at an example:

E:—————-——-———-
B:———— B—1/2——————
G:————5(7)———-——–
D:—–——————————-
A:——————————–
E:——————————–

As you can see from the above example, we are going to do a half bend at the 5th fret, to achieve getting the pitch of the 7th fret, but at the 5th.

Tip: A great way to learn the pitches or notes for how far you can bend to get the correct note. Let’s take the G-string on the 5th fret, which is a C note. Next, we are going to move up two frets, which is D. Let’s pluck the D note on the G string, and remember that pitch in your mind. After that, we will drop back down to our C note, and let’s bend the note up to achieve that D note.

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