Bending

The importance of bending is often overlooked by some guitarists in their pursuit for speed. If speed is your thing, don't forget the reason why you want to play in the first place, and that more than likely involves sounding good! So you need to remember to keep the feeling in there, and you will find that easier to express using bends. Bends are also a useful way of changing the sound of a note, and can break up the playing from sounding too mechanical and boring.

You should be using your fretting fingers to press down on the string at the starting note, and then pushing the string upwards away from your hand until you can hear the string has bent to the desired note.

The tabs for these exercises will tell you how much to bend, for example a 'full' bend, which would involve sounding the note a whole tone higher (2 frets) and a half bend obviously a semi-tone higher (1 fret).