Andy Timmons On Targeting Chord Tones With String Bends
MELODIC MUSE by Andy Timmons
THE BENDS, PART 4
String bending offers us guitarists a highly effective way to evoke a wide range of sounds and emotions from our instrument and emulate some of the qualities of the human voice, such as adding vibrato to a note, or seamlessly sliding, or gliding, from one pitch up or down to another, what is known as glissando. All of our favorite players use bending as an essential expressive tool when soloing. In this fourth installment examining this highly effective and useful technique, Andy Timmons plays through a 24-bar minor blues progression in the key of C# minor, touching on many different approaches to string bending.
THE BENDS, PART 4
String bending offers us guitarists a highly effective way to evoke a wide range of sounds and emotions from our instrument and emulate some of the qualities of the human voice, such as adding vibrato to a note, or seamlessly sliding, or gliding, from one pitch up or down to another, what is known as glissando. All of our favorite players use bending as an essential expressive tool when soloing. In this fourth installment examining this highly effective and useful technique, Andy Timmons plays through a 24-bar minor blues progression in the key of C# minor, touching on many different approaches to string bending.
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MusicTranscript
00:00Hey everybody, welcome back.
00:19Andy Timmons here, melodic muse for Guitar World, and we're going to carry on with some
00:23C-sharp minor blues.
00:25For those of you curious, this track that I'm playing to is actually from my In The
00:28Jam course that I did for True Fire a while back.
00:31Really great sounding bunch of tracks that you can jam on with me on, if you're curious
00:35to check that out, please do.
00:36But let's dig back in, we're going to turn on a bit more gain and play some blues here.
01:28Starting the solo, I'm building up to the pentatonic, but as soon as I choose a bend,
01:54it's clear that I'm thinking of tension.
01:56You know, it's on a C-sharp minor 9, but I decide to bend from the 3rd to the 4th.
02:07That wants to go somewhere, it needs to resolve.
02:21I would have been up to it, maybe beyond it, it's a major 3rd, so that might be a little
02:32difficult for some to get all the way up to that pitch, but try.
02:38Here I'm just barely touching on it, but I'm very accurate with the pitch.
02:56Continuing on, I bend up to the scale like we worked on earlier, I made use of that C-sharp
03:01minor Dorian.
03:05It's a nice way of building a little bit and playing some melodies.
03:17I switch to the B-string, not only on the G-string.
03:27At the end, I had to pull out one of my favorite bend licks from my buddy Steve Lukather, End
03:32of Rosanna.
03:33That really wide interval, but now of course that Rosanna's in G, this is C-sharp, but
03:41I'm on the B-string, bending from the E to G-sharp, you know, probably coming from Albert
03:52King at some point, or Hendrix, but it's done in a triptych for, and I do the same
04:04bend from the B to the, yeah, what is it, B to D-sharp, so first on the B-string, E
04:11to G-sharp, and then.
04:27So as you can see, there's so much potential with bending to add to your melodies.
04:32I've hopefully given you lots of ideas of how to kind of bend through the chord changes,
04:37how to, you know, apply tension and release from bending to certain notes, releasing to
04:42certain notes, so please, you know, hopefully you're inspired by this, keep playing, keep
04:48working at this bending, and I'm going to do the same thing, and we'll see you next
04:51time.