Guitar String Vibratos
Punctuating your lead guitar solos

This lesson, we'll be looking at the vibrato technique used in lead guitar. This should be quite a straight forward lesson - you just need to get comfortable with the physical aspects of this technique first.

So what is a vibrato on guitar?

Think of it like this - your lead guitar solos can be split down into phrases, similar to sentences. Now, there are various effects we can add to these phrases to punctuate them and add some character.

Vibratos are essentially a sound effect which makes a note oscillate up and down. Singers, especially opera singers, use this technique, and some people refer to it as "warbling".

Let's take a listen to a string vibrato done on guitar - listen closely for the oscillating effect on certain notes...

So you can hear how the note vibrates to create added texture and tone. You can use it for clean and distorted guitar, and it can be as subtle or wild as you like. For example, metal guitarists such as Pantera's Dimebag (RIP) use violent vibratos to add a virtuoso element to the music.

Vibratos can also help with intonation - higher up the fretboard, if you just let a note ring out flat, you may notice it to be slightly out of tune with the backing music. Applying a vibrato will mask this, because the idea is to oscillate around the desired note. Your brain and ears then get an idea which is the dominant tone.

Let's go through a few exercises so you can start using this great technique in your music.

String vibratos - the basics

A well done vibrato will sound fantastic every time. A poor or sloppy vibrato will sound...well...poor and sloppy! Some guitarists even go as far as to say a good vibrato can turn a bland/plain sounding solo into an epic solo.

The first thing we need to do is get all our fingers involved in the physical attack of a vibrato. Don't just use your strongest finger - exercise all your fingers so you can move much more freely over the fretboard.

Let's start slow... take a look at the diagram below:

It should sound something like this...

>> Click to hear

Obviously, the more you bend it, the larger the oscillation will stray away from the root note. In most cases, you want the bend to be subtle and as small as possible, but enough to make the effect present.

Trust your ears as to what sounds good and what sounds crap!

Once you're confident with the physical theory behind this technique, take a look at the exercises below to get your index, middle and ring fingers involved.

Click on the tab diagrams in this lesson to hear examples

Index finger vibrato

Other vibrato styles

There are other ways to incorporate vibratos into your lead guitar phrases...

Click the diagrams to hear examples where available

Bend 'n' vibrate

This is where you use the bend technique (separate lesson!) followed by a vibrato in the bend position. Once you've bent up, you release and re-apply the existing bend's tension in short pulses...

Diad vibratos

Basically, applying the vibrato to two notes instead of one. Great for blues. The thing to keep practising here is to bend both strings in absolute unison, to keep them harmonising together throughout the oscillation.

Ever watched a violinist do a vibrato? It looks like they've glued their finger tip to the finger board, desperately trying to yank it free! (OK, that's what it looks like to me, anyway).

What they're actually doing is applying and releasing horizontal tension on the string, rather than actually bending the string.

The diagram below is a little exaggerated - you don't want to yank the string off the tuning peg, but try to replicate that horizontal movement at various speeds:

The next stage is to learn how to really make it work musically in your soloing phrases. The exercises in this lesson were only really to get you into this physically, but you also need to know when a vibrato would compliment a particular note in a longer sequence of phrases.

We'll look at this another time!

For now, I would experiment as much as you can. Trust your creativity... I'm not just gonna spoon feed riffs and licks to you all the time!

Thanks for your time and effort. Use the links below to learn more - see you soon!