 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with Musicteacher.com and in this video we're going to talk about vibrato. All the tones you're hearing in this video are coming from the Blackstar Studio 10 6.6 which is mic'd with the Luit Audio LCT 440 condenser mic and I'm playing the Stanford Crossroads fully hollow guitar with P90 pickups. So vibrato is probably the most expressive and individual technique you'll ever learn on the electric guitar. When you're playing vibrato it really is down to how you interpret the vibrato of the note. There are a couple of technical best practices you can follow which we'll talk about in this video but vibrato ultimately is something that you as a player will take away you'll take these techniques you'll run with them and you will turn it into your own thing. This is one of those things that helps you develop your voice on the electric guitar. Like a singer when a singer performs vibrato they have their own way of sort of holding and shaking the notes you will do exactly the same thing as a guitar player and this is the reason why all of your favorite guitar players have a very unique sounding vibrato. So vibrato essentially is a modulation of the pitch of a note. So between you play a note either as a singular threaded note or as a string bend or whatever it is you want to do and you modulate that pitch by moving it up and down just slightly from the target note so it will look and sound a little bit like this in context. As you'll notice at each stage of that phrase I was holding a note and shaking the string. This is the vibrato effect. Now there are a couple of different ways we can approach this technique and there are a couple of different ways you can interpret it. So vibrato can work as a distance of pitch which we would refer to as narrow being a small pitch movement and wide being a much larger pitch movement. So if you imagine your pitch here is a straight line a narrow vibrato is going to move the pitch just slightly above that line. A wide vibrato is when we're going to really go away from that central pitch and come back to it each time. There's also a speed element to vibrato fast and slow so the speed in which I move away from that center pitch can be slow or it can be fast. So I'll show you a couple of different examples of that in the video as well. First of all let's talk about the technique of vibrato. So if I'm going to do a vibrato on this fifth fret here on the G with my index finger there are a few different ways I can approach this. Now personally I would use the sort of knuckle joint of my first finger as a pivot point so when I'm doing the vibrato I'm rolling my entire forearm down which in turn moves the string but you may also see some players who will take the thumb off the neck completely and you may also see some players who won't even anchor they'll do that up and down motion that way. For me personally the rolling motion works best but like I said it's all subjective and it's all about what feels right for how you're doing the vibrato. You can also apply vibrato to string bends so if I'm bending the seven here on the G for me I would do the same thing so I'd keep that knuckle joint anchored. Notice that vibrato is coming from my forearm rolling so my entire arm is doing this motion from the elbow joint but like I said you could also unanchor that knuckle again all down to personal taste and what works best for you. Try both ways try it with the finger knuckle anchored and without and just see what feels best. There's also no rule on which finger should be doing vibrato and I think it's very useful to practice vibrato with all your fingers because you never know when it's going to come up. Now the typical ones are going to be on the first finger or on the third finger for a bend but you may also come across times where your middle finger needs to do the vibrato or maybe your little finger so it's definitely worth practicing your vibrato with all different fingers. So once you've worked out your technique then you can start working on the distance and the time side of it. So the distance let's say I'm going to do a narrow vibrato on this fifth fret note here. What I want to be doing is just playing the note and moving the pitch just slightly either side of it. You can hear that vibrato just gives the note a little shimmer. It's very expressive for things like slow melody lines or blues playing but if you're a more rock based player you may want to do a wider vibrato. In that case you're doing the same technique but you're pulling it further away from that center point. If you now compare that to a subtle narrow vibrato you'll hear the difference. So using the right distance of vibrato is also very much subjective and down to the taste of whatever it is you're playing over. If you're playing over a rock track a wider vibrato is probably going to work better and if you're playing over a really slow blues or a jazz piece then that narrow vibrato is going to make that note sing a little bit sweeter than the wide one. The wide one may be overkill. The same is true for time-based vibrato. So I could do a slow vibrato or a fast one. Now the interesting thing with the timing is the timing is completely interchangeable with the distance. You could do a narrow slow vibrato or a narrow fast vibrato. The same is also true of wide vibrato. I could go slow and wide or fast and wide. So there are a ton of different options and you can apply the same thing to string bends. There's not really any limit on how you can mix and match those two different things. So when you're doing a pitch-based vibrato a good practice is trying to get that pitch consistent. So what you really want to work on is the distancing being consistent each time. What you don't want to hear is this. That's really erratic in pitch and it's going all over the place. You really want to get that nice steady pitch movement. So it just sounds like the note is bouncing up and down. The same is true for time-based vibrato. It's really good to actually practice vibrato in time with the metronome. You can do all your different rhythmic subdivisions like half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes and sixteenth notes. Stick a metronome on at whatever tempo you're comfortable with and split each beat up with different types of vibrato speed. So there you go guys. There's an overview of vibrato, what it is, the techniques and the principles you can use in your own playing. Now go and put some of those principles into your own guitar lex and see how much more musical and how much more vocal those guitar lines are. Don't worry too much if your vibrato isn't exactly like the way I played it or even exactly like your favorite artists because vibrato is something you will learn on your own terms. You will learn it by listening to your favorite players, listening how they approach it. You may even develop your own vibrato style based off two or three of your favorite players styles. It's all very subjective and all very fun. It's something we can all use to make our playing much more vocal and musical sounding. So let me know down below in the comments how you've gotten on with vibrato and what your favorite type of vibrato is and also which player do you guys think has the best vibrato. Thank you all so much for watching. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson. Let us know as well if there are any other topics you'd like to see us cover in these videos and don't forget to check out Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more videos just like this. And if you're looking for guitar teacher please check out MusicTeacher.com. There's a great network of teachers all around the UK waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.