I’ve been playing for a long time. I practiced bends constantly — slow, deliberate, trying to use my ear. I thought I was getting pretty good at them.
Then I actually measured them.
I won’t go into all the details but the short version is: I was consistently sharp on whole-step bends and had no idea. My ear had just… accepted it as correct.
The frustrating thing is there was no good way to practice bends with real-time visual feedback. Tuners don’t work well because they’re designed for static notes, not pitch movement. So I ended up building a small tool that shows your bend as a moving needle hitting a target — like a high-res strobe tuner but designed specifically for bends. It showed me things about my playing I genuinely didn’t know after years of practice.
Curious if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole — do you actively practice bend accuracy, or mostly rely on your ear?
I record and listen back to a lot of my daily practice sessions. I don’t actively work on bend accuracy, but if they are off I will notice when I listen back
I learnt by ear and I think that is the best way. I also own now Peterson StroboStomp HD tuner, which does exactly what you mention and is considered one of the most accurate tuners ever. I do occasionally now glance down during the bend and it is satisfying to make the ring fully stop.
If I’m just playing a tune, I just bend by ear.
If I’m practicing bending I’ll fret the targeted tone, then go play the bend to the target. To support my ear, I use a strobe tuner together with listening to the target note too.
How far off were you? Have you ever pulled isolated vocal stems from YouTube? There are channels that have access to the studio stems, others that use AI un-mixers. I’ve done it a lot. Run vocal stems from your favorite 1980s bands through autotune and watch the graph. Plenty of not-so-accurate notes. No one thought the singing sucked. In fact it was better than today’s (IMHO).
So you were sharp … did anyone cringe … or even notice? Or did you and your listeners need a machine to tell you it was “wrong”?
FWIW, I can’t bend worth sh!t so you probably shouldn’t listen to anything I say.
No, I haven’t use any tool (software/hardware) to analyse my vibrato. What do you mean by “moves over time”? If the pitch variations become more equal in duration and amplitude with practice?
I use my ear to reach pitch when bending, but after reading this thread I thought I’d check with the tuner. The bends in a solo I’m learning are above the 12th fret.
Pleased to say that my bends were in tune with the target notes.
Ah but, the target notes - and therefore my bends - were a few cents flat.
Time to adjust the intonation.
Attention to detail, eh!
Yeah, that’s part of it.
I’m more looking at whether it’s actually centered on the note or drifting above/below over time — it often feels even but isn’t.
If I am not mistaken, for the regular vibrato, it can never go below. It doesn’t matter if you are moving the string directionally up or down, you are increasing the tension, hence, the pitch always increases.
For the vibratos at the top of the bend, the situation is different - you can go above and below, but since we are using gravity (relaxing finger for the string to drop down a bit and then bend to pitch again) in this situation the oscilation is mostly below the pitch and back to pitch.
As others have mentioned, filming yourself regularly has all sorts of great benefits; including all the audio and visual aspects of your bends.
It’ll generally catch many of these hidden issues.
I check myself periodically by playing the bend, then the target note: bend, hold, pick 2 or 3 times, then play actual target note to compare. Skip the tuner. Use your ears. Record and review youself too.
I use an app called sound corset. Have been howled down for using an app and not my ear, sigh. I use my ear until I think I’m getting it right, then double check with sound corset off to the side to where I can see the note in the green or just missing it (for me, usually high). Sound corset is a lot quicker than tuners. A friend who plays harmonica at a weekly jam where very few call out the key before they start playing it uses it to help him quickly work out the key
I’m not sure how much you know so apologies in advance if I’m over explaining. And apologies to those who know the subject material 1000 times better than I do!
When music is recorded it’s not the band performing with a single mic in front of them. It’s each instrument played and recorded separately (i.e., “multi-track recording”). It’s then edited (delay or advance notes that miss the beat, autotune bad bends or vocals, splice this word from take 7 because it sounded better than that word from take 6, etc.) Then it’s assembled into a single recording (i.e., “mixing”).
A stem is a combination of these tracks that perform a specific function of the song. E.g., you might have a guitar stem that contains the lead and rhythm guitars and any doubles and special effects, all together in a single audio file. You might have a drum stem with all the many separately mic’d components of your drum kit (yes, they do this). You might have a vocal stem with the lead, harmonies, and backing vocals together. Or you might have a separate lead vox stem with harmonies and a separate stem for backing vocals. What you call a stem can vary somewhat, but usually its vocals, drums, bass, and guitars, keyboards, horns, whatever, depending on the style of music we’re talking about.
People are able to get their hands on these stems. Originally I believe it was from video games like Guitar Hero, since Guitar Hero doesn’t need the album recording, it needs the individual instruments contributing to the album recording. However people are acquiring them these days, people post them on YouTube and no one seems to be yelling “infringement” loudly enough to have the files taken down. There are literally thousands.
I find it to be a great tool. I am not in a band and never will be so I lack certain knowledge. I am curious about “how did they make that sound?” E.g., Is that the way their guitar sounds, or is it the combination of guitar, bass, and drum that makes that note sound that way? Listening to the guitars alone can help to answer that question. I often want to know how many vocal doubles and which effects the vocalist applied to get a particular sound. Did you a know a heavy metal scream sounds like absolutely nothing unless you add a few doubles and pack it full of delay and reverb? Things you learn from listening to stems.
Oh, and these days, “AI” is pretty good at taking a complete mixed recording, and splitting it out into its constituent stems. It’s now even built in to some DAWs. It’s far from perfect but for practice it’s really good. I use the vocals to hear what’s what, and I re-mix the tracks into what is effectively karaoke (either for vox or guitar).
