Basic Bends

by Christopher Sung One of the most important aspects of playing the blues is bending. Bending occurs when you finger a note, pluck it, and then either push it up towards your head, or push it down toward your toes. The more you bend, the higher the pitch of the bent note. In this lesson, we'll explore two bends in particular, in which you raise the pitch two frets, which are the most common ones in blues.

In the example below, we are playing blues in E. One of the most classic bends is to bend the A up two frets to the B. So in measure 1, right off the bat, we bend the A on the 3rd string at the 14th fret up to the B at the 16th fret. In measure 2, we do the same but on every beat in the measure.