How to Play Bends in a Guitar Solo

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Lais, and on behalf of Expert Village, I bring you soloing tips and techniques. When it comes to playing a bend, a similar concept sort of applies with your slide in the terms of that you want to start the bend a little bit before the target note that you're trying to hit. This is a technique that a lot of blues players use. And you can actually use it to kind of manually tune your guitar, where if you're playing a note and it's a little bit out, just sort of bend it up a little bit to find your note. But when you're really doing a bend, you have a target note. So let's again say that our target note is the high E, or the fifth fret of the second string, which is also an open E string on the first string. So, what I'm going to want to do, I'm going to start on the third fret of the second string, and I'm going to bend it up to that string, or to that note. You can always double check it by playing the note that you're trying to find. Today we're pretty good. Let's do it one more time. That's a bend. Something else to kind of point out is that a lot of people in the blues genre will bend the note to be slightly below the actual target note so that you sort of create a little bit of a tension. So, it will be--if here's our target note, we'll bend it up so that it sounds like this. And you kind of get that sort of tension going. Anyway, that's a bend."