Vibrato

dennis

this is not djang style but here s a lesson that i produced that s still relevent as far as the conceptual aspect of vibrato is concerned... watch the entire series, it s also available for free on my site

dennis

here are some note for note solos i did of django s... i tried my best to copy the inflections.. notice that django varied his vibrato a lot with regards to the speed, so the technique itself will vary as well

Scoredog

dennis wrote: »

haha thx for using my backing track, scoredog but if i may make a comment

when you do your vibrato (not all of them) you tend to be oscillating between 3 pitches when it should be 2 (at least in my opinion), you basically push the string up to a pitch but descend t a pitch that s higher than the original, it makes it sound out of tune as the brain generally wants to hear the pitch go back down to the original one..


the best exercise i can recommend is oscillating at a slow rate , say 8th notes at a slow tempo, and to practice going up a half step , high up on the b string, say 12 th fret.. bend up to c, go back to b, back and forth, and as lne gets better, and hears the pitches correctly, try a quarter step...

Sorry Denis I am going to somewhat disagree with you, actually I hear Djangos and yours and a few other GJ players keeping their vibrato generally a hair above pitch (you can see it also as you play, you keep the string stretched above the original tone), I think that's a distinctive sound and of course sounds great. My vibrato generally goes back to pitch though for some reason you can't hear that. I also don't attempt to mimic Django's exactly, as I wish to have my own voice but still want to feel GJ. Vibrato to me is what gives a stamp to your personal voice. Emulating Django to the T is against what I want to portray as a player. There are other GJ players who I admire who don't mimic Django's vibrato to a T and still sound correct in the genre.

wim

It's funny because in a workshop once I've asked for help with getting a good vibrato sound and the teacher asked to see how I was doing it currently - so I've demonstrated my crappy dead and flat sounding vibrato - then his suggestion to improve the sound was precisely that the vibrato notes should be pulled above pitch.

i.e. it's already bent slightly sharp on the vibrato notes, and then sharper again from the vibrato. He explained this is what makes them "pop" out from the melody. I went away and thought about this, and slowed down some Django parts to very slow speed and listened carefully. And sure enough it was right, Django's vibrato notes were significantly sharp compared to the rest of the line.

It makes sense in a couple of technical ways too :
- some people already mentioned pushing down hard on the string; increased finger pressure into the fingerboard does increases the pitch slightly
- you generally hit the vibrato notes with a strong accent and this can also affect the pitch; strings have a non-linearity in their vibration modes where a forceful strike temporarily increases the length and hence tension of a string which causes a slight raise in pitch. You can hear this if you take a dreadnought and really pluck the low E string distastefully hard, the pitch changes a fair whack.

wim

Good playing Dennis, gee whiz that's a lot of work to get all those Django lines down with the timing and everything - it must have taken some time to memorise!

I noticed your pinky finger on the fretting hand has a lot of extraneous movement during playing - it's curling up quite tightly and then straightening out and wiggling around all over the shop, I'm wondering if that has ever been a cause of pain or discomfort after long hours of practice or gigs?

Jazzaferri

thanks Dennis

Buco

@Scoredog I like the bit where you say that you don't move the finger, you move the wrist which in turn moves the finger.

@pickitjohn that's a really great video with BB, what a thougthful person he is. So with him it's all about the wrist rotation. Very cool to watch him and see how effortlessly he does it.

After watching the first video Dennis posted, I accidentally clicked on the video with Zakk Wylde where he was answering a question about his vibrato and he was saying as well how it's a very personal statement and how you could have a bunch of guys play the same lick and you couldn't tell who is who until they did a vibrato and then immediately you'd know who is playing.

Here's another video by John Jorgenson where he talks about vibrato as well. I got the link from older "vibrato" thread, there's been a bunch of these as I noticed in "similar threads" section but none has been as involved as this one and as interesting and informative as this one. What a great group of people, as different as some of the opinions may be.
I actually really like the sound of John's vibrato here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=50&v=h5-R_ws6JAA

Last night I played a gig and in the few spots I conscientiously tried to move the string down instead of up when doing vibrato. It probably sucked but it's a start.

Bones

Thanks for all the info guys. One take-away for me (as someone who's vibrato totally sucks) is that there are a number of different ways to do it which is kind of cool. This inspires me to actually work on it!

Buco

Same here, I sort of discovered as I tried different ways to do vibrato inspired by this thread, that my side to side vibrato sounds much better than what I remember. Could be the consequence of these finger strength exercises I've been working on, but it sounds pretty nice so I think I'm gonna stick with it primarily, for now at least.

Jazzaferri

One of the cool things about the classical style vibrato is that one can do it on chords

@Buco you got me going on finger exercises too.....seems to help in lots of areas