This is an interesting type of vibrato that I’ve always seen but cannot master. The palm of the thumb is lifted away from the neck and the fingers seem to do all the vibrato. When I try this, the vibrato sounds totally erratic. Does anyone have lessons on this type of vibrato? Any youtube lessons, examples or tips?
This looks somewhat like B.B. King’s vibrato, which has an element of forearm rotation. You can see what he had to say on it in this short vid:
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That’s it! Unfortunately, it seems to be totally natural to BB and he can’t articulate exactly what he’s doing. I need a super technical nerd explanation, like those from Troy.
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He does definitely state that he isn’t bending the string up and down which would be what happened if you rotated the forearm - I think it’s more of a whole arm shaking motion.
The removal of the thumb and palm side of the hand ensures that you’re momentarily increasing and reducing the pressure on the string rather than just shaking the neck up and down without actually vibratoing anything.
Try the same motion as if you wanted to slide rapidly between two frets, but apply enough pressure through the finger that you stay in place (not so much by pressing with the finger as by letting the weight of the whole arm come through the finger tip).
As a bonus you can then try vibrato by rapidly sliding between two frets in the style of, say, Greg Howe.
B.B.'s definitely bending the string and using rotation, there’s plenty of evidence of that (see attached vid, or any other performance). I believe in the initial vid I linked he’s trying to convey that the string is bending both slightly up and slightly down, though I don’t know if that’s exactly true.
At any rate, the player in OP’s original linked vid is visibly bending the string for vibrato, rather than using some sort of horizontal motion.
Once you’ve got it down with the method I just described it’s the work of a few seconds to add in a bit of up and down wobble as well.
Please don’t interpret me as intending to say BB never bends the string, it’s just I know from experience that if you try to bend the string as you normally would with forearm rotation while you’ve got your thumb round the neck, but with your thumb and hand off the neck, you get an uncontrollable motion that sounds terrible.
Maybe this is purely a me problem but I can’t get that speed of shake out of forearm rotation, I have to lock my forearm and go from the elbow
Is it possible to get that same sound but with a technique that comes easier to you? IMO it makes no sense to learn a whole new technique if you can get that sound with a slight mod of your usual technique.
My habit when bending and vibrato-ing is to push the string toward the ceiling, rather than pulling it toward the floor. I am not able to reproduce the vibrato in the video with a push-style vibrato whether I bend with my wrist, forearm, fingers, or elbow. I am unable to musically perform this type of bend at all without gripping the neck between my thumb and index knuckle, which again doesn’t match what B.B. says in the video.
It occurred to me to experiment with pulling instead of pushing and I was surprised at how different the results were. I found the type of vibrato in the video fairly easy to mimic when pulling instead of pushing. Faster and wider vibrato comes more naturally, especially when bending with the forearm. Also, the thumb is no longer needed for leverage. While I found it more controllable to keep the inside of the index knuckle against the lower edge of the fretboard, I also found it was possible to perform this vibrato touching only the string against the fretboard, not touching the guitar with the left hand at all other than the fingertip, like B.B. says in the video.
Have you tried pulling instead of pushing?
Ok, so… That’s a very nice vibrato. His is better than mine, but my approach is similar, closer to BB’s I think than his. Quick demo, and as much as I can distill from what’s going on:
I don’t think the “floating hand, thumb not attached to the neck” thing here is absolutely critical, and in fact I’m kind of doing it both ways here. Experiment a bit, trying not to think and just play, I seem to do it more on the B string than the G. High E, this approach doesn’t really work, you’ll just be pulling the string off the side of the fretboard.
For me, at least, my hand is NOT entirely un-anchored. The first knuckle on the base of my pointer finger is anchored on the guitar even when my thumb isn’t (and still when it is), and it’s serving as a pivot point so when my hand rotates it pulls the string downward.
Once anchored like that, the motion here is as simply as shaking your wrist, and that’s where the speed and depth of your vibrato is controlled - a slower rotating motion or bigger rotation would make your vibrato slower ot deeper, for instance.
You can see the rpotation in my wrist, even in grainy, still-processing video, fairly plainly - look at 0:03, for example, and try to contrast the motion compared to 0:04-05, where for the first note with my pointer finger I’m shaking/rotating my wrist downwards towards the floor, but the second, my wrist is shaking/rotating upwards towards the ceiling.
This is basically just doing small, fairly fast, semi-controlled bends. I think it’s definitely possible to take that metaphor TOO far, and if you’re thinking consciously of a “ok, bend, now release, now bend, now release” it’s going to get really awkward fast… but the mechanics are similar enough.
Does this help? I had a hard time getting a good angle for this and the lighting isn’t really ideal.
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The vibrato being used in the first post to me seems very similar to how Clapton does his vibrato - he does his bends with a thumb anchored over the top of neck, but removes it for the vibrato, which he does by holding his hand/fingers rigid and “shaking” from the elbow joint with the biceps and triceps.
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I really like his vibrato there. Must give that a try. Although I’m not completely certain how to do it… but it does look like what you are describing here.
I use something similar, but I find it a lot easier to use on the three highest strings than on the three lowest - it works better for me “pushing” towards the bass strings than it does “pulling” towards the treble ones, if you know what my mean?
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