Hello again.

I guess summer holidays are coming to an end up there in the Northern Hemisphere. I hope you had a good one. It's pretty well mid winter down here in Australia, but where I live, it's always balmy. The tourism slogan for my neck of the woods is "Beautiful one day, perfect the next", and that pretty well sums it up.

I've figured out how to get music to stream automatically from my site, and I've been sitting here at the computer recording my fiddlings and loading them up. The whole process takes just a couple of minutes. Drop into http://lorange.kirk.net for a quick ditty if you're interested in drop Dobro. It should start to play automatically when you open the home page, the second page you come to.

In other news, I'm turning my site http://www.guitarforbeginners.com into a book. I've had a few requests to do so, and I've now got the means to make it happen. It seems as much as we love the internet, there's nothing quite like a book. This one will be spiral bound, and I'm also including a new adaptation of my invention, The Guitar Slide Rule, which comes with PlaneTalk.. The new version will instantly show you where all chords and scales can be found on the fretboard. Go to http://www.guitarforbeginners.com for more details.

Here is this week's article:

Hammering on, pulling off and bending.

It's more polite than it sounds, and not easy to explain in words alone, but I'll give it a go. I'll also make a new page for the subject with some sound clips one day soon.

"Hammering on" is a technique whereby you get a note to ring out by hammering the string with a fretboard-hand finger down onto the fret , rather than picking it in the normal fashion. Almost always, you've already picked a note on a given string, and the hammer on occurs on this already vibrating string, the impact with the fret wire making the new note (higher up the neck and higher in pitch) ring out. It's a pretty basic technique that, once you know how it works, you incorporate into your playing without even thinking about it. Many, many well known guitar riffs rely on this hammering on, and wouldn't sound right if not played that way. Hammering on also allows you to string notes together faster than if you had to pick each one. Often a really fast sounding phrase of several notes has only been picked a couple of times.

"Pulling off" is the opposite to hammering on. You get a new note to ring out by pulling sideways off an existing fretted note so that the release sets the string vibrating. You kind of pick it as you let go. The string now will ring out with a new note; if you've pulled off to an open string, that open string note will ring out; if you've got a new note fretted behind the pull-off note, then it will ring out. Again, this technique allows you to play faster than if you were trying to pick each new note, as a pull off is an instantaneous event. It happens in a nanosecond.

I guess you could rightly say that hammering on is for ascending lines - going up in pitch; pulling off is for descending lines - going down in pitch.

"Bending" is the technique whereby you make a note rise in pitch by 'bending' the string. The action is more of a sideways push across the surface of the fretboard, so that the string stays in contact with the fret. As you push the string, its tension increases and the original note rises as the string stretches. This can hurt when you start out. Pushing against steel strings that are already tense can be quite painful. One trick is to bring other available fingers to assist in the pushing. I just studied my hand then and I see that I'm usually using three fingers together to bend the string.

The trick to bending, of course, is to know when to stop. Whatever new note you bend to must be in pitch, whether you're going up a semi tone, a whole tone, or more. This is where the practice comes in.

You can also "un-bend", a term I just made up. That's when you've already bent a string up, then pick it to get it ringing, then release the bend to make a new un-bent note. It's trickier than going up in pitch because you have to estimate the tension, the bend, before hitting the note.

As always, all of these techniques simply become second nature after a while and they all get sprinkled in to your playing as required. Each can be refined and added to and experimented with. For example, bends can also occur when more than one string is ringing -- one being bent, the other not. Experts at this can make their guitars sound like pedal steels.

The main thing is to keep on twangin', to keep that guitar out of its case and in full view; to make sure you're always in tune (buy an electronic tuner is my advice) so that you're not put off by sourness; to remember that, even though it seems like music is a million things to remember all at once, in fact it's just one thing, and that if you DO keep on twangin', you will see it as such.

All the best,

Kirk
http://kirklorange.com
http://lorange.kirk.net
http://guitarforbeginners.com
http://mp3.com/kirklorange