Basic Vibrato Techniques

Hi, I am Stewart Bull from licklibrary.com and welcome to this lesson on left hand vibrato. What we are going to do here is strike a note. It does not really matter where and then we are going to add vibrato to that note. I am going to use the B string, eight fret, G note. Now there is a note with no vibrato whatsoever. Here is the note with the vibrato. Okay, so hopefully, you can hear that note kind of just moving up and down. What we are going for is if we saw it in our seismoscope or you know of those things that measures earthquakes, we would like to see a nice even movement in the note. We do not want anything shooting up quickly or being erratic.

We want a really nice movement in the note and how we do this is to tie the neck. This third finger is going to play the note and then we are going to branch this two behind it and what we are going to do is we are going to move our whole hand. So hopefully you could see that. For those of you that have done string bending, you can see that it is like a series of many bends. As we speed that up – depending on your taste is how fast you want to make it or how fast you can do it. We can also do this with all of the other fingers. I tend to favor the third finger and the first finger. What I tend to do is once I struck that note, the thumb tends to go up. Especially when I am using the first finger and then I can as almost use the thumb as a way of shaking the hand.

And I use the vibrato, add a nice tone with the sound but it also helps us to sustain the note. If you play it just normal, you can hear it die away. If I add the vibrato, you can hear a little bit more juice out of it, a little bit more length out of it. Okay, one other type of vibrato that I want to discuss is what is known as the violin type of vibrato where you basically fret the note. In this case, with the first finger and then you are going to move your hand this way. So we are going to go that way then that way. Obviously a lot smaller motion, I am just showing you this though. Pretty nice in balance and slow change. One other type of vibrato I am going to show you, I am not personally very good at this but I thought I would show it to you. It is the Eric Clapton type of vibrato. He kind of moves his whole hands instead of side to side like I do, up and down. I will not argue with Eric, so that is vibrato, have fun.


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