Welcome to this new series, Advanced A.I.

In this series we are going to look at mastering Articulations and Inflections

A huge part of a player’s style is in the way they articulate their notes. The way they colour and shape the notes is just as important as the notes themselves. Techniques like vibrato, bending, slides, pick attack, etc, etc all combine to make a player’s sonic fingerprint. This series will give you all the tools to start building a desirable and professional level fingerprint of your own.

Today we’re looking at the 55 essential bends. I originally saw a list of 18 common bends years ago in a Guitar Techniques magazine and have added to it over the years. In this lesson your goal is to perfect your ability to pull off these bends with perfect time and intonation, and also to start building your personal repertoire of the ones you like.

There are a couple of things I recommend doing with this list,

the first is to try to interpret it without watching the video, see what ideas you come up with just from the written instructions where possible. Just pick 5 or 6 at a time and practice jamming over some backing tracks with them. You don’t want to practice for too long as your hands will tire, I had a very difficult time keeping my hands in check whilst filming the video.

Once you’ve had an initial browse, watch the video. Write down any ones that you think are interesting or new to you and give them a practice.

Once you’re familiar with all of them, I recommend practicing at least 3 to 5 of them every day, just for a couple of minutes. Keep rotating which ones you work on and you’ll be surprised how quickly you improve!

You can also experiment by adding any of the following ; slides, volume swells, inflection bends, additional pick strokes.