Hi Muris, I'm practicing your lydian phrasing lesson for beginner and my vibrato technique is very poor. Could be great if you can tell me something to practice. I don't know if it's a combination of finger and wrist movement. Please, show me the way to start improving that technique.

Thanks!

Shame on me but I don't have any vibrato lessons on the site so far.

However,there are few ways of doing it and in
most of them wrist is very active.
The way I do it most of the time
is that I bend the string up and down,
that is not like typical bend when you have to listen to the note on the bend,
it's just like swinging the string up and down,
speed of these bends will determine speed of vibrato of course
and larger bends will produce more curved vibrato.
For soft vibrato you can go for smaller bends and you'll have it.
Don't be confused by word "bend" here tho,
those are really not typical bends but string reacts like they are,
it swings up and down.

Let me know if I missed something.

I may add something Muris, sorry to bark in mate

I have developed the vibrato by bending consecutively every fret with every finger along with the metronome, and watching TV at the same time. I hope this method can help somehow (with or without TV)

No trouble at all and your add has sense of course,
try with all fingers and at different tempos/speeds.

OK thanks to both!!! I'll get down to work today.

By the way I'll post here the difficulties I could find practicing.

Of course the most ugly difficulty I found is the seized movement of my finger and wrist.

I'll have you informed!!

Thanks againg mates

You're welcome Valentino,keep us informed.

Hi again.

Reporting improvements

Well, my vibrato is going better and my movements are less seized. I'm moving more my wrist with less strength, it's a slow vibrato but more controled, so I think is going fine.

By the way I have problems when I bend and do a vibrato. The sound fade out after 2 or 3 motions, I think this is because I release some pressure during the motion. Practice practice practice.

And also when I bend sometimes (almost always ) the upper strings that I'm moving when I bend the lower string sound too. Any technique to avoid that "extra" sound?

Thanks

Hey,good to hear things are going up way!

As for bend and vibrato,pressure needs to be constant and hard
in order to keep note singing,it'll come with practicing as you said.

As for upper string ringing,you should apply some direct right hand muting.
Direct muting is very obvious thing since you touch the string with the pick,
middle finger or with some other finger.
You touch it and don't let it ring,it's simple as that.
I do this a lot but I never thought of it,
I realized what I'm doing after watching some of my videos.

Muris,
I notice on alot of your videos you use "finger vibrato" as well. Especially when you are doing a fast run and your thumb is behind the neck and not in a very good position to do wrist vibrato. I never thought about this before but I am gonna have to start using this technique. I always try to use my wrist but your hand isn't always posistioned to be able to do this.

Monte

I'd like to add that vibrato is 100% strength, so there's no excuse!
This is a true excersize workout, and "I can't shred" isn't an excuse either

Just like that Monte,you should do proper thing for proper occasion,
there are NO rules,only different ways to get something,
this time you have either wrist or finger fibrato.



No excuse,yup.

Yes, I too have been practicing the lydian beginner solo and was wondering about your vibrato technique.

I just noticed that when you're doing slower wrist vibrato in this piece you tend to plant your thumb closer to the headstock, spreading the hand and enabling the fingers to straighten and get more travel with less wrist movement. I tried that, and I think it's working for me.

But I want to ask about direction and length of movement. I've read that one should always do vibrato towards the center of the neck, i.e. up on the lower 3 strings and down on the upper 3. The motion should be from neutral towards the center, and not back-and-forth across neutral. It looks like you always pull the string down, except on the high E where you have to go up. What are you actually doing, and what would you recommend to me? Avoid crossing neutral, or always cross neutral, or anything goes that sounds ok?

Thanks for your help!

Motion could be done in few ways,
just look at the things in logical sense and you'll figure it out.
Can you move low E upwards?
No you can't, and that means that the only option is downwards, all good.
What about A?
Well, there is some space for pushing upwards but safe bet is to go downwards only, yeah.
And what about D?
D can be bended upwards without any problems, even up to tone and a half.
There's no need for that wide vibrato on D string most of the time tho, just saying.
So with D string you go both up and down.
Same with G string.
And when you do it from wrist you can actually do both up and down movement
with ONE wrist move, that's pretty economical btw.
Let me explain this for you.
Let's say you play note D on G string, 7th fret and you start applying
vibrato from neutral and you go up, that's one motion for your wrist.
And now you're going back, crossing neutral spot and continuing down, all with one wrist move.

Up only, down only, up and down, doesn't matter as long as it sounds good, try them all!