Once you can bend a note up to its target, the same movement does three more things. You can let the bend back down while the note still rings. You can bend the string before you pick it, so that the first thing heard is the higher note. And you can bend a held note a little, over and over, which is vibrato.
The release
Bend the G string at the seventh fret up a whole step, hold it, then let the string come back to the fret without picking again. One pick gives you two notes and the slide between them, rising to E and falling back to D.
Bend and release: 4 up to 5 and back
Bend and release: 4 up to 5 and back.
One pick sounds both notes: D rises to E, the note at the ninth fret, and falls back again.
The pre-bend runs the other way. Push the string up to E before you pick it, then pick and let it fall to D. The hard part is bending silently to the right pitch, which is why the card plays the ninth fret first: that is the note the silent bend has to find.
Pre-bend and release: 5 down to 4
Pre-bend and release: 5 down to 4.
The string is pushed up to E before it is picked, so the first thing you hear is the note from the ninth fret, and then it falls to D.
Vibrato
Vibrato is a small bend, repeated. Push the string a little, let it back, and keep going at an even speed while the note rings. A string can be pushed but not pulled below its fret, so on a guitar the note wavers upward and back rather than around its pitch.
Vibrato on the root
Vibrato on the root.
A bent vibrato can only raise the pitch, so A wavers up from its fret and back, and the note never goes flat.
Many players have imitated B.B. King’s left-hand vibrato, and his precise bent notes. The National Endowment for the Arts named both when it honored him in 1991, and they are worth listening for together, because his vibrato is often on a note he has just bent.1
Sources
This lesson was drafted with the help of AI, so it may contain a mistake. Its diagrams are drawn by Everyfret’s own software. How Everyfret is made