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:

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

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

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.

And here's where I'm at after a week of practice, probably six sets of half hour practice:



It's a little sloppy at 84bpm, but I think that's me being camera-shy. I was clean at 88bpm before I hit record ;)

Damon, you're a monster! I'm not sure you mentioned what speed you started off with at the beginning of the week?

Tone sounds pretty good to me. And I've been meaning to say for some time, I really like your clean tone.

I've been slowly pushing up from 60bpm to 70 something over the week. Seeing this, I was inspired and have just pushed up to 84bpm, but a little sloppy with one of the combos. I'll try and post results on Sunday, and see how far I get in the interim

Nice work dude! I don't think speed is important here, just accuracy and minimal motion.

Here's my take at 60bpm, 16ths. A few hesitations, but I think that's mostly down to unfamiliar finger patterns. For me, the hardest definitely seems to be the down/up combo. Not sure if this is a physical issue that needs work or just because it's the least familiar pattern of finger movement.

Damon, Diego - thanks for the feedback. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand. I thought I had a pretty good left hand now, with minimal movement and a good stretch. My fingers are typically curved too. Which part of the fingers do you mean should be pointing towards me? The knuckles, the tips?

Very nice Damon! It sounds so fluid and relaxed when you do it.

Bet you can't say 'necrobestiality' as fast as you can play it :).

What are you demonstrating with the two picks? Difference in tone with the more pointed one?

Thanks for the kind words guys!

Scott - I feel very lucky that the guitar turned out so well. It was a big risk speccing and paying for it (it wasn't cheap!), but it turned out better than I imagined. Not only does it look beautiful, but it's very comfortable and fantastic to play. Sounds great all across the fretboard.

Damon - yeah, the open hand is a new thing, I started doing it just before Christmas to help with string damping. I know it's not advocated on here, and I'm not wedded to it as a technique, but it seems to be working at the moment. I compared speeds with a closed hand, and for me I can't feel any difference at the moment.