Acoustic bluesmen Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson began experimenting with string bending as early as the late Twenties and early Thirties. But it wasn’t until the invention of the
Acoustic bluesmen Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson began experimenting with string bending as early as the late Twenties and early Thirties. But it wasn’t until the invention of the electric guitar—with its long sustain—in the late Thirties and early Forties that bending started to become a playing staple of many early guitarists.
With these two important innovations, the guitar’s status was elevated from its primary role as a rhythm instrument to that of a lead instrument. And it wasn’t long before the guitar supplanted the piano as the main solo instrument in many blues combos.
Through the years, legends like B.B. King, Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan helped advance string bending into the major role it now plays in guitar-based music, so much so that it has become the defining sound of the electric guitar. Let’s take a look at some of the more common bending techniques guitarists use to make their instrument sing.
The most popular types of string bends are the quarter-, half- and whole-step bends. In this lesson, we’ll discuss these in the context of the A blues scale (A C D Eb E G).
There are five bends commonly used in conjunction with the blues scale, all shown in FIGURE 1:
• the b3rd to the 4th
• the b7th to the root
• the b3rd up a quarter step
• the 4th up a half step to the b5th
• the 4th up a whole step to the 5th
FIGURE 1
Because some of these bends take a bit of finger strength, try using your non-fretting fingers to reinforce the finger doing the bending. For example, if you’re bending with your third finger, use your first