In the Woodshed

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String bending when soloing is second nature to us as guitar players, but this month we focus on using the technique to bend the lower strings in the context of riffs. We can jump straight in to Example 1 which is a nifty primer for this technique featuring some nice and easy quarter-tone bends using your second, third and fourth fingers. For the lower three strings it makes sense to pull downwards for bending as opposed to pushing upwards as we tend to do in our favourite blues licks. After this light warm-up we can start to get a little wider with our bends. Example 2 ascends the A Minor Pentatonic scale along the fifth string so there’s a mixture of tone and minor 3rd bends throughout. The concept here is to make each bend fit within the scale.