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Vibrato bridge or pre-bend with vibrato?


DarkHorseJ27

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I've been obsessing over my vibrato lately, and among my findings is that I strongly prefer a vibrato where the pitch fluctuates above and below the base pitch. Classical style vibrato is much too subtle on metal strings, at least for me. So that essentially leaves me with two options:

 

A. Get a guitar with a vibrato bridge and rely on that for my vibrato. The drawbacks would be greater difficulty changing to other tunings and a more of a pain to set up.

 

B. Pre-bend at a lower fret for every note I want to add vibrato to. A plus is I can do it on all my guitars and not just a vibrato equipped one. The drawback of this is I can see it quickly becoming a gigantic pain in the ass.

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tremolo:


tremolo_lg.jpg

vibrato:


B500L-NKL.jpg

now that we're all clear, let's stop calling them the wrong things, shall we?

 

Yes, they're mixed up, but the majority of the guitar world has accepted and standardized the mixup. Even if someone is aware what the functional difference between tremolo and vibrato is, they still know what you're talking about if you refer to a tremolo bridge. Just like the English speaking world has standardized the mixup between parkway and driveway.

 

Anyway, OP, I don't think tremolo/vibrato (;)) bridges are that hard to set up. Certainly it would be less of a pain in the ass to set them up than it would be to prebend a note every single time you want to vibrato. Seriously, I think that would just end up severely hampering your technique and limiting what you can effectively play. Especially when it comes to improvisation.

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I'm not sure I understand the question. Using a vibrato bar ONLY for vibrato? Absolutely not. I see the usefulness in bar expression but I have a beef with guys like Beck, Van Halen or Steve Lukather ( who I saw playing last night. Brilliantly, I might add.) relying on it TOO much. Finger vibrato, to me, is the most personal vibrato. All 3 of the guys mentioned have outstanding bending/finger vibrato, discovered the magic in bar vibrato, and overuse it, in my humble opinion.

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