This month Simon Barnard guides you through a number of approaches to using your guitar’s whammy bar across a diverse range of genres.
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The whammy bar, or the vibrato arm, comes in many different guises, each with its own unique way of altering the pitch of your guitar strings. The Vibrola system designed by Doc Kauffman and introduced back in the 1920s, suffered from poor tuning. Paul Bigsby developed his well-known vibrato as a more stable unit to replace the troublesome Vibrola. In the 1950s, Leo Fender came up with the industry standard floating design, before Floyd Rose and Kahler, with their double locking systems, came to the attention of guitarists who liked to abuse their whammy bars while keeping their guitars in tune. Over the years many more designs have come into use, from companies such as Gotoh, Wilkinson, Ibanez, PRS and Vega-Trem.
The whammy bar has been fully embraced by guitarists, with techniques developing as music styles and technology also advanced. Many iconic solos or instrumentals have the whammy sound at their core. The opening riff on Duane Eddy’s Peter Gunn shows how it can be used with the fretting hand pressing on it to dip the open E note. Hank Marvin took the idea further by using the arm extensively during his time with Cliff Richard and The Shadows, the instrumental Apache being a great example. David Gilmour often used the arm to produce vibrato rather than employing his fretting fingers, while Jimi Hendrix raised the game even further by introducing dive bombs and other advanced techniques, which were then adopted and developed by the likes of Van Halen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Dimebag Darrell. Of course Jeff Beck was the master, using his Strat’s bar to create lines with scoops and doops to alter the pitch of regular notes and harmonics.
It can be quite tricky to use the whammy bar at first, especially when trying to accurately intonate changes in pitch. You will also need to ensure that your guitar is set up properly to aid with tuning stability. Locking systems can help with this but can make changing strings and tuning more cumbersome (and some players simply don’t like how they make the guitar feel).
A common approach to using the bar is with the picking-hand’s second, third and fourth fingers pulling up, and either the fingers or palm of the hand depressing it to lower the pitch. This highlights a prime advantage of the arm - the very fact that it can lower the pitch of strings - whereas string bending only allows it to be raised. This ability makes the device excellent for many types of musical expression, such as creating lines akin to a slide guitarist.
Our examples and study piece will guide you through various ways to use the vibrato. For maximum success, make sure that your timing and intonation are spot o
