How to Play Vibrato on Guitar

Here is how you can apply a vibrato effect to your guitar playing.

Let us take a simple guitar lick like this. It sounds a little boring without this effect as you can hear. Apply the vibrato effect and you can hear the difference. The way you play this effect is to hit the string and then in this case on the B string, I am using this motion with my wrist and try to make an even motion so I am bending down the string. I am letting go. I am bending it down again and letting go. And I do it by twisting the wrist a little bit like this, see. And the speed at which you do this kind of defines your vibratos style. A lot of blues players seem to prefer shorter vibrato like this while some shred players seem to want to have this type of vibrato.

Sometimes you cannot bend down. On most strings you can do this effect by going on like this with your wrist. But there is one exception, the high E string. You cannot do that because you will run off the fret board. So we have to do the opposite. You have to bend upwards. And the same technique applies here as you go to different directions so you kind of push up like this and then let go. So this one, I am bending down to do my vibrato. And this one I am doing the opposite. There is another way. You can also use the vibrato when you bend up the note. It sounds really good when you bend a note. To do that, you bend up the note. In this case, I am going from the note G, A, and the high E string. I will start on the 15th fret. So bend up first and then I will wait a little bit before I play the vibrato.

In the vibrato, I am doing it in the same way as I do this vibrato on one string here and one note here. The difference is I have the note bend up. Now, we will do the same motion. I can use the other strings as well. I am doing this motion with my wrist. And as you can see, I am using all three fingers. I also want to bend because the reason is this just goes that easy to bend and you get stronger with three fingers than with one. This is really hard. Two is better. But three is even better than that. It gives you more strength that you can easily bend it up and not getting tired.

Let us take another lick that is very simple by starting here on the B string on the 10th fret, switching to the E string and then back to B string, E string again, B string and then back to B string. Then you apply the vibrato at the end when you get to this note. See, I am not playing that vibrato by going down. But if you prefer, you can go up as well and play with the speed. You can also of course play the vibrato effect to not only single notes but the chords. I do that quite a bit. For example, something I like to apply the same approach is to bending down with the wrist like this. This chord is E7 #9. It is a real cool sounding bluesy, jazzy chord. If you apply the same motion as I did when I showed the vibrato effect here as to folding or twisting your wrist a little bit like this using all fingers now, you will get the same vibrato effect but not all the chord. So it could sound like this. It sounds pretty cool. Now, also use that same effect if I play just two notes. See I am doing that motion again this with my wrist. Only over two strings now. Now guess, this nice E minor sound Dorian scale. So there you have it. That is how you can use your vibrato effect when you are playing.


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