How to Read a Half Bend on Guitar Tabs

Series Summary

So you're learning how to play guitar are you? Great! We are happy to help. Every guitarist should be able to read tab. This is a much easier version of sheet music for guitar players only that uses lines to represent strings and numbers to represent frets. There are very different symbols to represent techniques than on normal sheet music so we are here to help guide you through each of them.

Our expert, Bryan Billhimer, will show you many of the symbols associated with a piece of tab music including half, whole and even 2 step bends. He will continue and show you how to read different levels of vibrato, palm muting, raking and even double picking. Looking at a piece of tab it might seem daunting but trust us, our expert will not let you down. Watch these videos and you'll be flying accross the neck in no time!

Video Transcript

"BRYAN BILLHIMER: In this clip, we're going to be talking about our first symbol here and that is a half bend. This right here is our half bend. It's an arrow pointing up and you'll see a half symbol there. And then below here see, it says "bend half step." So, when you're bending on guitar, you're not just bending to any note. You're always bending to a specific note. In this case when it says half, we're going to be bending up a half step. So, on our tablature, we saw a 12th fret on the B string half bend. So, a half bend means you bend a half step. So, a half step on guitar is just up one step one fret. So, the 12th fret, the 13th fret is a half step. So, we're going to bend our string up so that when we bend the note, it sounds like the 13th fret. So, we can check that by playing the 13th fret. That's a half bend. Now I'm going to show you how I might use that maybe in a riff or something. If I was playing like a blues lick, I might go. Okay. So, now, we got the half bend down. In the next clip, we're going to talk about a whole step bend."