Example of bending on electric guitar

A bend is a guitar technique that involves "bending" the tone upwards, thus making the note or chord sound sharper than normal. Such pitch changing technique usually produces extremely smooth tone, unlike the sliding, that sounds somewhat chunky as the finger passes frets. A guitar is a musical instrument characterized by its visually dominant body and neck. ... This article is about the musical notation. ... Duane Allmans slide guitar is highly regarded in blues and rock circles. ...

Basic technique

To produce a bend the guitarist puts a finger on the string and then, while pressing the string down on the fret, strikes a tone, and pushes the string either up or down. This has the effect of stretching the string and thus makes its pitch higher. Generally a bend on the 1st-3rd strings will go "up" as seen from the guitarist's point of view and a bend on the 4th-6th will go "down". The technique can also be used with distortion to make "screams". A distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of an object, image, sound, waveform or other form of information or representation. ...

Bending is usually limited to 1-2 semitones, rarely a bit more and involves overstressing the string that could lead to string breakage. A semitone (also known in the USA as a half step) is a musical interval. ...

Advanced varieties

• Backward, reverse or release bend involves pressing the string on the fret, pulling it up to stretch a string first, and then striking a string. This produces an effect of note going flat, the reverse direction of straight bend.
• Several strings could be bent at once.
• Various bend patterns may exist: for example, straight bending of a string 2 semitones up, then 1 semitone down, then 1 up, then 2 down.

Figure 1. ...

Difficulties

• The most difficult moment for the beginners practicing bends is getting note bent to proper pitch. Usually the bend changes note pitch exactly by 1 semitone or 1 whole tone (2 semitones), and most beginners fail to bend a string exactly to proper pitch, producing overbends and underbends. Most guitar teachers advice playing the target note on a higher fret, listening closely to its sound and trying to bend a string aiming to get exactly the same pitch.
• Bending (especially heavy bending, more than 1 semitone) usually involves touching more than 1 string with a left (fretting) hand, as seen on an illustration. Usually, making a heavy bend with just one finger is considered a bad practice: once bent string will touch the adjacent one, the adjacent one will also produce some sort of unneeded tone that will result in overall muddy sound. Thus, while bending one string, usually it is necessary to hold and bend (without striking) one or two adjacent strings in the direction of bend. Picture shows a guitarist bending a string with ring finger simultaneously holding and bending two upper string with his middle finger.

The musical interval of a major second — also called a whole-tone — is the relationship between the first note (the root or tonic) and the second note in a major scale (and also a minor scale). ...

Sound