Well, I hope you guys feel I'm qualified to set a challenge. This one isn't actually on Pebber's syllabus, so far as I'm aware, but I feel it's a very important thing to practice. I haven't practiced it very much at all, recently, and you'll see what a hash I made of it in the vid below.

The idea is simple. We're playing Am at the fifth fret. We start descending, playing a note from the scale, then moving down one note and bending up to the previous note. Start at C at the 8th fret on the top E, and finish at G on the 3rd fret bottom E.

Then go back the other way. This is a bit more challenging, since you haven't just heard the note you're going to bend too. You can hear what a tin ear I have:



Good luck!

Awesome challenge - Yeah I'm in! Ear training, baby...

Great stuff Scott.

Is noone else up for this? Is everyone too busy worrying about speed, or am I the only one who thinks he needs to spend more time on pitch and control?

String bending is an important part of learning to control the sarod I am in.

sorry for being blunt but please don't post in challenge threads since you don't take part in any of them. i personally don't take part of threads "you" post in. and i really wan't to be a part of these challenges series since it lets me evaluate where i'm at with my technique and make some improvement. so…. you know what to do. make your own happy little sarod threads maybe?

+1

thats not clicky at all...I thought we were a community...

Here's my take on it, I tried to keep it in the spirit of the actual challenge, but it was tough to refrain from slapping some vibrato on there; I am a actually quite adept at bending, and have a good ear but it's funny how things that are familiar can tie you up when you change the context. A good thing to practice though, as I get my picking under control. Bending notes is fun, and really an important part of modern guitar playing.

Cool post, I am not surprised that people avoid this one at all; Ears/Pitch matching stuff sends guitarists scurrying to the hills almost as fast as sight-reading does! hahaha

http://www.scottkerrmusic.com/CCS.mov

1st day, sloppy and some bends hurt lol.

Thanks for posting guys! You both sound awesome! Scott, you over-achiever you... Ashan, I recommend trying to go up the scale too; it's a little more challenging.

I think maybe vibrato should be some sort of stretch goal? For myself, I wanted to avoid it, since it might hide whether I can hit the note on pitch or not. But maybe a good thing would be to bend up to the note clean, sustain for a bit, then add vibrato?

Nick - there's no clique here, but this thread as about one specific subject, and it's not sarod. You can sound the notes with your teeth or using your brain's alpha waves for all I care. It's not about picking. There is more to the guitar than sarod. Contribute to the subject at hand, or move on to a different thread.

thanks man. i'll definitely ascend the scale while i practice this! till next time have fun practicing these challenges guys! all of you are great since you make a effort at this to improve yourself. and thanks to the great ones for overseeing us and offering guidance. (pebber, ursin, frakh, and yes you too damon.)

Ashan, Cliff; Nice work, dudes!

I am a bit late on this one. I hope you guys don't mind.



Note: I recorded this video a week ago when I was staying at my buddys. I did not realize that I was just playing random stuff on the end. Sorry about that. I should have checked before posting it I guess.

Great work! Very quick and confident bends - love it.

Good stuff, guys. Bending is one of those things.... no such thing as "enough" practice... Even once you're good at it, you still need to work on it in my opinion.

And here's where I am after a week - definitely still a work in progress:



I was making slow progress throughout the week, until on Friday I hit on the idea of using the tuner to help, which is what I'm doing here too. What I do is use my ear to do the bend (plus my fingers....), then double-check against the tuner. Over the last three days I've definitely gotten better using just my ear. The tuner is on the headstock, so you can see me double-checking myself when I look towards it.

One limitation I've noticed in myself is that I can usually hear when the bend is off-pitch, but I struggle to determine if it's too sharp or too flat. Not sure if anyone else has the same problem?

Anyway, looking forward to hearing how the rest of you got on with this one. Big thanks to those that participated!

Cliff

Not sure I should comment here since I didn't do this challenge myself, and since I'm being a bit more critical than usual. But I'm gonna...

One important thing when bending is surely to nail the pitch of the target note. No question. BUT, we can't just bend to that note in any old way. We have to bend to that note musically. Sometimes we'll bend very quickly and sometimes we'll bend a bit slower. But, I don't think bending up to pitch super slowly thereby allowing all of the intermediate atonal microtones to be audible is what we're going for when bending.

So, using the tuner to check that your target tones are right is a great idea. (Very soon you shouldn't need to do this anymore though.) But I also recommend this exercise be attempted using a metronome. Practice very fast bends where the tone to which we bend is in time and the tone from which we start is a grace note that doesn't get much time. Additionally, practice bends where the starting and ending tones each get an equivalent amount of time.

Perhaps there are instances in music where what I've written is just way off, but for me the slow bends are just not pleasing to the ear at all. So if such instances are out there, my ears keep me from wanting to hear more...

Fair comment, and most of the contributors here seem to have done what you suggest.

For me, I don't think my ear is yet good enough to achieve that... yet.

Well ok, but it's really the muscle memory in your fingers/hand that's going to get you to the right pitch each time. Not your ears. Imagine bending at 160 bpm. Your ears aren't going to have the time to help you bend, but they will surely be there AFTER you bend to let you know if you did it or not.

When you bend slowly like that, your hands aren't learning the proper force with which the strings need to be bent. I really recommend trying to nail the tone with a quick bend, over and over and over and over. Each time you bend, glance at your tuner. Eventually you'll start to nail it because your hands will remember how hard they need to work.

One analogy is a chord fingering. You want to land all fingers at once. You don't want to land one, then land another, and another until you get there. Go for all at once and let your hands remember how they need to move to do it again.

Not sure I entirely agree with that - the force you use to bend the string is the same regardless of the speed you do it. You need to bring tension of the string up by a certain amount, and that requires the same force from your finger.

At any rate, here's my attempt at doing it with a metronome:

https : // www . youtube.com/watch?v=hmH9AnMev7g

Sigh....

not true cliff, b/c F=MA

F=Force

M=Mass

A=Accelleration

since accelleration is a function of velocity (by taking derivative) the force appyed to bend a string is subject to how fast stuff is happ'nin

hehehe..Someone should write a shred book on "Speed Bending"...Because the quicker bend will get you more chicks than a slow bend.

Cliff,
I don't know if Pebber gave us a bending video for free, so instead check out this one. Aside from him (luckily for me) talking about finger muscle memory, notice how the bends are pretty quick. This keeps those intermediate microtones continually passing and therefore never unpleasantly sustained.

Thanks Damon, I'll take a look.

Nick - a little physics knowledge is a dangerous thing. The important force in bending is the force you apply to counter the increased tension in the string, not the force you apply to initially bend the string.