How To Develop Killer Guitar Vibrato That Sounds 100% Pro

How To Develop Killer Guitar Vibrato That Sounds 100% Pro

by Tom Hess

It goes without saying that vibrato is an important technique to develop for all guitar players... That said, only a few guitar players out there actually take the time to practice and master it. However, there do exist tons of players who either accept having poor vibrato and never try to improve, or think it will just get better on its own. In the end, if your vibrato doesn’t sound great, neither will anything else you play.

Before you can make your vibrato sound totally pro, you’ll have to focus on breaking it down to its essential parts and developing each part on its own. Then you have to put it all together. Check out this video to observe the process of mastering vibrato on guitar:

The following are five key pieces of advice that will put you on the right path towards mastering vibrato and making your guitar playing sound amazing:

1. Make Sure The Physical Catches Up To The Mental

Physically playing vibrato is not really that hard. You just have to use your thumb as an anchor around the neck around the neck and rotate your forearm/wrist to produce vibrato. On the other hand, it’s much harder to train your hands to create the exact sound you hear in your head.

Whenever your vibrato doesn’t sound very good, don’t just accept it. Instead, be proactive by asking yourself: “What is missing here?” Is the vibrato too narrow? Is it too wide? Is it out of tune?” Asking these kinds of things will help you train your hands to achieve the sound you really want to achieve.

To improve your ear for hearing great sounding vibrato, do the following:

1. Pay close attention to how your favorite guitar players use vibrato in their playing.

2. Try to translate the vibrato used by your favorite singers onto your guitar (for more information about his, check otu this article about how to play killer guitar solos).

3. Work on switching between amazing vibrato and bad vibrato by intentionally playing it very narrow, very wide, too fast, out of tune, etc. By doing this, you will be able to easily identify whenever you or anyone else is playing poor vibrato.

2. Find Out How To Use “Delayed Vibrato”

You don’t always have to apply vibrato as soon as you play a note – Instead, give the note a moment to ring out... and wham!... apply the vibrato. This will drastically improve your phrasing in the following two ways:

1. Delayed vibrato emphasizes the vibrato itself, and gives your playing a lot of intensity.

2. Using delayed vibrato keeps you from rushing to apply it (making mistakes in the process) or playing it in an out of control way.

Check out how delayed vibrato is used at 3:18 in the video above.

With this in mind, there certainly are moments when applying vibrato to a note right after you play it is appropriate. It will be much easier to do this in a controlled manner once you’ve learned how to use delayed vibrato (but not the other way around).

3. Understand Precisely What You Are Searching For

Whenever you practice vibrato, you must be aware of what sound you are trying to create (and what sound you DON’T want to create).

Truly amazing vibrato and really bad vibrato are nothing alike (just watch the video above to see what I mean). Amazing vibrato is always:

- 100% controlled

- In tune

- Played in-context with the music it is used in

(Really bad vibrato is not at all like all of these things)

Note that your vibrato shouldn’t be used in the exact same way all the time. It may be used totally differently based upon your playing style and the context it is being used in.

For example, it may make sense to use a narrow vibrato like so: listen.

Or perhaps, if you want to express intensity in your music, you could use a wide vibrato like this: listen.

These two examples both are created with total control (and are in tune). They could be good or bad depending on what musical situation they are being used in. There are many other types of good vibrato besides these ones as well.

Here is what vibrato that is not controlled, and out of tune sounds like: listen. This will never sound good in any musical situation.

Work on discovering which vibrato style achieves the particular emotion you want to express and try to create this whenever you practice. To get help with this, download this free eBook about making your guitar licks more emotional.

4. Develop Solid Vibrato For Bent And Unbent Notes

When you can achieve the vibrato sound you are searching for on a regular (unbent) note, start using the same approach while playing bent notes.

Go through each of these steps:

Step 1. Select a note that you want to bend and identify the pitch you want to bend to. For instance: start on the pitch for fret 2 of the G string, and bend up to the pitch of fret 4.

Step 2. Pick the first note and apply the bend.

Step 3. Once you’ve matched the desired pitch you are bending to, let it ring out for a second.

Step 4. Pick the string one more time and apply vibrato to it.

Step 5. Repeat steps 1-4.

Step 6. Now, move to a different part of the fretboard (such as higher than the 18th fret, or playing on the lower frets of the lower strings) and repeat the steps once more. Do this for five minutes or so.

To listen to what this sounds like, watch this video at approximately 2:55:

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5. Vibrato Integration Through Variations

Training vibrato away from all other areas of your playing is not going to help you become a better player as fast. You must learn to use vibrato in all contexts, with any technique it can be applied to. Come up with a guitar lick and create many variations of it by focusing on HOW you play the notes (and playing them differently in each variation). This is a great way to integrate vibrato into your overall guitar playing.

To hear many examples of how this is done, read this free eBook about how to play emotional guitar licks.