Learn to play some fun and easy beginner interval bending licks with Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman, aka Uncle D. Interval bending is a great technique and can make some great sounds to compliment your soloing. This technique is a staple in the sound of country, country blues and blues to name a few. Darrin demonstrates the technique in the step by step video instruction and with the included tabs you will be smashing this technique tonight!
Introduction
How’s it going everybody? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson and today I want to show you a couple of pentatonic interval bending ideas for licks that you can hopefully incorporate into your own playing.
So right now, Guitar Control is giving away this really awesome daily practice routine to improve your lead guitar chops. This was put together by our very own Silvio Gazquez, a two-time Guitar Idle finalist. This routine covers the four main concepts that are necessary for lead guitar; alternate picking, legato, sweep picking and tapping. All the tabs and exercises are all included in this free ebook and there’s a link in the description where you can get yours.
So be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look at this.
All right, so you can see on the tabs, staff one, which is just a single measure; measure one is one idea and measure two is another idea and they’re not in really any particular order. These are movable since there aren’t any open strings so you can move this around into whatever key you want.
Interval Bending Lick-1
So this very first one here we’re going to look at we’re going to start off with a slide from nowhere to the 13th fret on the G string. So I’m going to use my middle finger to do this and the reason for that is that the following notes after that is 12 on the B string and then 14 on the B string… So what we’re going to do is we’re going to slide from nowhere to 13 and this whole thing’s got like a triplet, one two three, one two three, feel to it. So we’re going to do that slide from nowhere to 13 and then follow that with 12 on the B string and hammer to 14, one two three… Okay so now the next part here starting on the second beat this is where the interval bending comes in. So what I’m saying by interval bending is that I’m going to bend this note up and I’m gonna play it over the top of this note here. So if I bend to where it was pretty hard to bend like a unison bender where you’re bending to the same pitch here we’re bending because we get that cool interval. You can make some really neat sounding stuff that kind of emulates, like in country music, that pedal steel sound. So slide from nowhere to 13 to 12, hammer to 14 and then I’m gonna drop my pinky onto the 14th fret of the high E string; so I’ve still got my third finger on the 14th fret of the B string, but you want to keep your first and second fingers down here too so it’s easier to bend and you get all three fingers to give you the leverage to bend easier. So we’re going to bend this note up the whole step… and what we’re trying to get is that inner third sound there. So how I’ve got it written on here and this is for an idea so it’s like one two three… to the one two one two three and then starting on beat three you’re gonna do the bend again and then you’re gonna do bend and release… Then the 12th fret on the B string your first finger and then just let it roll up to get both the B and high strings together… Now you could change that around, you know speed it up, slow it down or you could increase the length of the bends… whatever you need to do to kind of make it fit whatever you’re playing…
Interval Bending Lick-2
All right, and then for the second one, it’s more or less the same concept, we’re just going to move it down a set of strings. So now we’re going to do our slide from nowhere to the 13th fret on the D string and now I’m going to use my third finger to do this because the next notes are going to be 11 on the G string hammer to 13… So here we have… and now we’ve got… Now for the bend on this one we’re going to bend that up a whole step on the G string, but then we’re going to be playing it over the 14th fret of the B string with my pinky… same concept of on the other one. The only difference is we’re on different strings and now we have to be up a half step on the note we’re playing over the top of. Now when we end this one… we have this 11th fret here on the G string and instead of going to 11th fret of the B string we’re going to go to the 12. So we’re getting that same fourth interval that we got here, but because the B string is a half step lower than the other string so you always have to compensate for that… So same thing you can elongate it…
Combining The Licks
Now you could try doing stuff where you hook the two things together, and again it kind of depends on what you’re playing over the top of. I would experiment with it so like here when we’re here… it’s like a B major and then we go to like an E… Now when we go to this one we’ve got an F sharp down to a B. And to the other one we had the five, so if you wanted to think of it that way it’s like E and F sharp; so one four five. But anyway you can move this around into different keys… wherever you want to do it… Anyway, this is just one idea of lots of different things you can do. My recommendation for like experimenting and finding these intervals is if you just take the pentatonic scale and you could do the same thing going into the lower strings, it just doesn’t really sound as good in my opinion. Anyway, if you take the pentatonic scale and you’re bending this note we already know we can do that that unison bend there we can do that there we could skip over a string… So in that case you have to hybrid pick, but that could be a subject for a whole other video.
Conclusion
All right, so there you have it, a couple of interval bending ideas for licks that hopefully you can apply it to your own playing. So if you like this lesson be sure to give me a thumbs up and leave a comment down below if you have any questions about this or other guitar related topics. If you’ve not already done so please subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss any of the content that we upload throughout the week. Well that is all I have for you today. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
