How to Dramatically Improve Your Vibrato Playing

You may have been practising your vibratos brilliantly. They sound great on their own. But then when you then go to put them in a solo or in a song. It just doesn't quite sound right.

Maybe then you've tried to practise it in that song over and over again. But when you try playing a vibrato in another song, again, it just doesn't quite hit the spot.

How can you improve your vibratos when it comes to actually playing it with everything else you are doing?

Play your vibratos with chords

This is a great way to strength up your fingers for playing vibratos. Try doing chord vibratos. Practise using individual fingers for each string and slowly work up the strength to do it for an entire chord. And make sure each note in the chord sounds consistent as well.

Checking the pitch that you are hitting your vibratos to

What pitch are you aiming for when you do your vibrato. Perhaps it's just slightly flat or sharp? Or maybe it's too wide for the emotion you want to express or maybe too small?

Try out different notes by bending, rather than doing a vibrato to figure out what sounds the best first, before doing for a vibrato.

Practise doing phrasing elements around your vibratos

Be able to smoothly transition from a vibrato to other phrasing elements will get your guitar playing sounding even better.

For example, adding vibratos to the end of your legato. Or going from to vibrato from a whole tone bend first.

Placing your vibratos into your music with taste

Getting your vibratos to sound really great also involves good anticipation. You don't want to overdo the vibratos that they are all over your solos. But when it does happen, you want it to be amazing.

Try Mimicking

Besides the different types of vibratos and trying it out with different phrasing elements. Check out what your favourite guitar players are doing. Where do they put their vibratos, how do their vary the pitch of theirs. What other phrasing elements do they use before and after their vibratos for you to practise?

Play Play Play

You can only practise one note for so long. So make sure you do play it with other things. Whether that's at your next jam, or improvising with it. Try to include your new practised vibratos in front of people as much as possible.

You can even record your own vibratos so you can monitor how it sounds, and listen back to it.

The idea is that you want to get your vibratos so consistent and be so confident with it, that you can nail it every time. Whether you want a little vibrato, or a nice wide vibrato at the end of an epic solo. Especially when you play in front of people and the nerves can kick in.

The more you practise the things we've said, the more you will be in control and get your guitar playing sounding more awesome.

Guitar Tuition East London is situated in London, England and has been successfully and continues to help hundreds of guitar players to improve their guitar playing with great result. The reason being that they take a very engaging, friendly approach to learning. That involves some near magical innovative methods and electric and acoustic guitar lessons in London to promote the passion in learning how to play guitar.

Click here to tell me about your current skills and frustrations: