Classical Guitar Vibrato Effects

Video Transcript

" I’m going to show you another advance technique that classical guitarists use. It’s called Vibrato. And a lot of times you will see electric guitar players or blues players do a type of Vibrato where they move the string across and up and down on the actual fret board. Up and down like that. What that does is shorten the length of the string which raises the pitch of the note and when you alternate back and forth it raises and lowers and creates an effect that helps each note stand out. We do it a little differently in classical guitar; while maintaining the form I showed you before, having the nice spacing between all the fingers. Fingers nice and arched, you want to remember to always keep a nice space in here, you don’t want to have it clutching the fret board like this. You want to be able to have some space between the palm and the neck and you just lightly move back and forth against the neck along the length of the string. That creates the same effect but allows you to do it much more rapidly and much more cleanly. The way to practice this is nice and evenly as you play the note; slowly pull forward and back, forward and back and once you’ve got that down you can slowly speed it up a little bit until you create a nice even Vibrato effect. That is very useful for creating intimate passages where you want to be very expressive and really bring out the melodic lines that you are playing. Things like that and just remembering that you always want to move across the string evenly and don’t press down too hard otherwise it will sound very strained."