Now, I’m probably not a beginner guitar player anymore but I’m not really sure that I’m that far from a beginner. I guess this is one of those areas that I lack confidence in. Yes, I’m building up knowledge and even some skill but putting it all together so that I can replicate the guitar players that I grew up with (some were great but most were just players who could strum chords and probably didn’t know too much music theory) is another thing entirely.
Lately, Mick has us working on a project that is playing along with a jazzy/blues chord progression that begins in B then changes key to C, then to C#, then to D then back to B and over again. The progression is nothing special but it allows for some improv or in our case some simple composition. The composition though is really just giving us a progression that presents us with new elements to work on.
The first that we worked on was string bending. Bending a string wrong is pretty simple as I found. Bending a string correctly takes a lot of work and concentration. To maintain control, you are usually using the inner most knuckle on your fore finger as a pivot point on the neck of the guitar. To give additional control, you keep as many fingers on the string to be bent as possible. In some cases, this may be one but could be four. NEVER – NEVER forget that you have a target note that you are aiming for. This can be 1/4 bend, 1/2, or whole bend. In practicing to hit that note, you have to constantly play the target note so you can hear where you are going. It’s hard but eventually your ear will tell you what is right or wrong so practice will pay off. I’m still striving to get this correct though I’m getting better all the time.
The next thing we added to the riff is vibrato. It is similar to string bending in that you still want to maintain control so you use the inner most knuckle on your fore finger as a pivot point on the neck of the guitar. Mick says that fast vibrato’s don’t sound good so the vibrato that is slow and even are the best. Now, I’m sure that speed is related to the skill of the guitar player and speed of the song so a fast pace rock riff might have a faster vibrato that a slow sad blues riff. So far, the middle strings are the easiest for me and outer strings are really hard to get to sound right. This one is going to take quite a long time to get right though when you play riffs, you can hear spots where this technique just fits right so you want to perfect this technique.
In the riff that Mick has be working on, the hardest thing is keeping technique elements straight. You may have a whole bend followed by a 1/4 bend followed by a vibrato. The 1/4 bend and vibrato are very easy to get mixed up so concentration is really important. This is challenging but very fun.