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
00:00everybody welcome back Andy Timmons here melodic muse for guitar world and we're
00:22gonna carry on with some c-sharp minor blues for those of you curious this track that I'm playing
00:27to is actually from my in the jam course that I did for true fire a while back really great sounding
00:32bunch of tracks that you can jam on with me on if you're curious to check that out please do
00:36but let's dig back in we're gonna turn on a bit more gain and play some blues here
00:57so
01:02so
01:08so
01:13starting the solo
01:41I'm building up
01:43this kind of building up to the pentatonic
01:48but as soon as I choose a bend it's clear that I'm thinking of tension you know it's on a c-sharp
01:57minor nine but I decide to bend from the from the third to the fourth
02:01that wants to go somewhere it needs to resolve
02:09so I would have been up to it maybe beyond it it's a major third
02:27so that might be a little difficult for some to get all the way up to that pitch but try
02:35there I'm just barely touching on it but I'm very accurate with the pitch
02:41continuing on I bend up to the scale like we worked on earlier I made use of that
03:00uh c-sharp minor dorian
03:02it's a nice way of kind of just building a little bit and get in playing some melodies
03:13and then I switched to the b-string not only on the g-string
03:18at the end I had to pull out one of my favorite uh bend licks from uh my buddy steve lukather
03:31end of rosanna that really wide interval
03:34but now of course that rosanna's in in g this is c-sharp but I'm on the on the on the b-string
03:43bending from the e to g-sharp
03:45you know probably coming from albert king at some point or hendrix
03:53but it's done in a trip d-4
03:59and I do the same bend from the b to the uh yeah what is it b to d-sharp
04:07so on the first on the b-string e to g-sharp
04:12and then
04:15so as you can see there's so much potential with bending to add to your melodies you know
04:32I've hopefully given you lots of ideas of how to kind of bend through the chord changes how to
04:38uh you know apply tension and release from bending to certain notes releasing to certain notes
04:43so please uh you know hopefully you're inspired by this keep playing keep uh working at this bending
04:49and I'm gonna do the same thing and we'll see you next time