Bending & Reading Guitar Tab

Video Transcript

"MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hello. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. The next topic, we're going to look out for guitar tab reading is what we call the "bend." This is where we literally take one of our guitar strings and we bend it from where the fret that it's at. We bend it up to get to hit a different note. And so, you'll see it commonly, it's written something along the lines of this. You'll have a note or a fret, in this case the 11th fret, a little lowercase B, telling us to bend to the 12th fret. Now, what that means is we're going to take our string. We never actually leave the 11th fret but we bend it up until it sounds like we're playing at the 12th fret. So, for instance, if I'm here at the 11th fret, I want the sound of playing here, that's my 12th fret, and so I bend this until I get to this pitch and I literally bend the string up. You can also bend it--commonly only see bending up towards one or two frets above the pitch that you're at. In this case, I'm bending up towards 13. So, here's my pitch at 11, and I wanted to sound like 13. So, it's a pretty far bend. You can hear it though. You can hear that same pitch. So, we have to bend pretty far up. For the most part you really just push on the string. It takes a little bit of ear training but you can really--you can hear when it matches. A lot of the times you want to check the note that you're reaching for and see if you can hit that note. You'll also sometimes see this kind of case. Where I see 11, I bend up to 12 but then I bend back to 11. So, it's saying I'm going to start with this note, I'm going to bend up to this note, and then bend back again to 11. So, it'll look something like this. I actually bend back down with it and I end where I started. We want this sound so we take our 11, we bend it up to get that sound. In this case, we have 11, we want the sound of this fret, the 13th fret, so we take our 11 and we literally bend it up 'til we get that same sound. You can also bend it up and back again to have a sound that resembles this, 11, 12, 11, so we do this. Bend up and back again, and we end where we started in that case. So, those are three common types of way you'll see bending written in guitar tablature."