Most of us think we’re bending in tune. Most of us are wrong. Not because we’re careless — but because nobody ever showed us a reliable way to check. This lesson gives you two simple methods that will transform checking your intonation from an afterthought into an automatic part of how you practise.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: Two practical checking techniques — the Verification Method and the Intended Line — that you can apply to any lick in your current vocabulary, right now, to find out whether your bends are actually landing where they’re supposed to.
Why You Need to Start Checking
Assuming you’re bending accurately because you’ve been playing a while is exactly the mistake that leads to years of muscle memory built on slightly wrong pitches. Once those habits are ingrained, unpicking them takes real work. The earlier you introduce checking into your practise, the less correction you’ll need later. You can’t fake success here — you need to be listening to your playing and know what your target notes are.
The Verification Method
This is the simplest check of all. After you play a bend, immediately play the actual fretted note you were bending up to. Let the bent pitch settle in your ear, then play the target note and compare. Did they match? This makes the evaluation concrete and unavoidable. Use it at any point in an exercise or within licks you already know — anytime you play a bend, you can follow it with the verification note to keep your ear calibrated.
The Intended Line
The Intended Line is for phrases where bends sit in the middle of a run. Instead of playing the lick with bends, play the whole thing fretted — substituting the target pitch (the note the bend was supposed to reach) for each bend. This feeds your ear the exact pitches you’ll be recreating with the physical bends. Once that clean, in-tune version is in your head, add the bends back and see how well your muscle memory matches what you just heard. As the transcript puts it: play the intended line, get the sound of those notes in your head, and then check your bending against it.
Play the intended line — say you’ve got a lick that has bends in it — and then check your bend against it. So you’ve got the sound of the notes you need to hit in your head.
Making Checking a Habit
Neither of these methods is useful as a one-off experiment. The goal is to use them so regularly that checking becomes reflexive — something you do without deciding to. Put them at any point within the exercises in this course, and any time you’re running through a lick that contains bends. Five minutes of genuine checking at the start of a session is worth far more than thirty minutes of playing through lines while ignoring whether the bends are landing.
Taking it further: Once these methods feel natural, start applying them to lines you’ve been playing for years — not just new material. You may find that some well-worn licks have been slightly out of tune for a long time. The Intended Line is particularly useful for exposing this, because it strips out the physical act of bending and lets you hear the harmonic truth of the phrase.
Your homework: Take 5 minutes to practise these methods on licks already in your vocabulary. Are you bending in tune? Pick two or three phrases you know well, run them through both the Verification Method and the Intended Line, and be honest about what you find. Bring your findings — and any surprises — to your next session.