Bending strings is probably the most important of all the articulation techniques available to the rock guitarist. More expressive than hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides, a bend (the action of stretching the sounding strings across the fretboard with a left-hand finger, raising its pitch) can turn your soloing technique from merely adequate and accurate to soulful and expressive. Because the pitch changes in a truly continuous fashion in a bend (rather than in the discrete, fretted intervals that hammers, pulls, and slides are relegated to), you can really access those in-between notes available to horns, vocalists, and bowed stringed instruments. What's more, you can control the rhythm, or travel, of a bend — something you can't do with a hammer-on or pull-off. For example, you can take an entire whole note's time to bend gradually up a half step; or you can wait three and a half beats and then bend up quickly during the last eighth note's time; or you can do any of the infinitely varied ways in between. How you bend is all a matter of taste — and your personal expressive approach.

To play a bend, pick a fretted note and push (toward the sixth string) or pull (toward the first string) the string with your left-hand fretting finger so that the string stretches, raising the pitch.