From the course: Acoustic Guitar Lessons: Intermediate

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Bending strings and vibrato

Bending strings and vibrato

- Now let's cover bending strings and vibrato. These big steel strings are kind of tough, but you can just grab onto those and bend them to give all of your single notes so much more soul and like a vocal kind of effect. Let's check out a few different ways to do that. So first of all, it's good to sort of support your hand. Often as you're doing vibrato or bending, you want to sort of pivot off of this place. You're going to hold your index finger closer to the fret board and then kind of pull back either up or down. You want to go only in one direction. You don't want to ever do vibrato by bending up and then back down. So generally you're going to bend it and release it back to its original position. You pretty much just hold the string up against the fret board, move it up keeping it totally against the fret board, and then back down. And let's try first with some single note bends just to get your fingers sort of used to it. Use your third finger, and if you can, try to place…

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