Electric Guitar: Tremolo Bar Licks

Tremolo bars, whang bars, whammy bars - personally I have never been too fond of them while playing live gigs because I do not trust them. They can cause your guitar to go badly out of tune if you manipulate them as hard and as roughly as I do. But for recording purposes, I will use a tremolo bar, since I can stop recording at any time and retune my guitar if necessary. But to use a tremolo bar during a live gig with hundreds or perhaps thousands of people expecting to hear great music that is always in tune - No, I tend to shy away from whammy bars for that very reason.

Nevertheless, I will provide a few tremolo bar licks in this article, which you can practice if you have an ultra-fancy tremolo system that you enjoy manipulating and that doesn't go out of tune if someone breathes on it the wrong way. Even though I don't use whammy bars very often in live situations, I'm still fairly adept at most of the tricks associated with them: dives, bombs, growls, shrieks, squeals, subtle vibrato on notes and chords; and of course the lizard-down-the-throat technique which was invented by Joe Satriani. (The lizard-down-the-throat is a strange technique where one hits a note on a certain string, say, around the 4th fret, then slides their finger (and the note too) toward the higher frets while gradually depressing the tremolo bar, as in a dive, and it produces a thoroughly demented sound similar to a person sticking a lizard down their throat in a crude attempt to swallow it. Pretty harrowing, don't you think? But try out the lizard-down-the-throat technique if you like, you may love the sound of it -- I know I do.

So now I will list a few whammy bar licks in tablature form, in case you would like to test out whether your guitar will stay in tune or not. The first two licks involve trilling, the most basic kind of whammy manipulation lick; and finally we will get a little fancier by trilling more than one note.

------------ / depress tremolo bar slowly /
G string:{-7-10-7-10-7-10-7-10-7-10-7-} G & B strings: {9/9b-11/11~-}

Notice it ends with a double stop bend that you can add vibrato embellishments to as well.

Now let's legato a three note lick as we depress the whammy bar to hit all of those wonderful microtones in between the regular fretted notes. (Note it also ends with a double stop bend.)

-----------/ depress tremolo bar slowly / ~
B string: {-7-9-10-9-7-9-10-9-7-9-10-} B strings: {-9(E:10)b11-}

At the end of the lick notice that you are hitting the 9th fret on the B at the same time you will hit the 10th fret on the high E and then bend the 9th fret up to sound the 11th note. That's hard to indicate in the tablature above, but since I can't use a fixed width font in this article, that's the way it has to be.

All right, now let's get truly incorrigible and even a little experimental. Grab your whammy bar and whang it like a maniac as you try out this lick, which uses another legato based three-note trill. Again, I want you to really lay into your whammy bar, but be careful not to break it. For this lick I depress and release the bar in an exaggerated fashion to produce extremely disturbing sounds that will occasionally stimulate the listener's brain waves (and my own), so that they feel strong currents of passion and excitement.

------------------/ depress and release tremolo erratically /
high E string: {-9-10-9-12-9-10-9-12-9-10-9-12-10-9-10-}

Note that for most whammy bar licks it is usually impossible to describe the action of the tremolo bar as it is manipulated. But for the examples in this chapter, simply depress and release the whammy bar as you perform the moves with your fretting hand, taking note of what sounds good to you so that hopefully you can repeat the same actions in the future. But for the last lick above, move the bar in a greatly animated fashion, almost violently (but without breaking anything), as you perform the trill, adding dynamics and subtleties as you like, and again trying to notice what movements sound compelling so that you can repeat them later. Personally, I love the sound of this last wild lick, although it may be too outrageous for some guitar players.

Another exercise is to simply play various natural harmonics on your guitar and manipulate the resulting pitches with your whammy bar in different ways: dives, vibrato, pulling up the bar, flicking it, etc., and then trying other experimental variations of your own. Have fun and try to keep your guitar in tune!

Reference:

"Tremolo Bars & the Wah-Wham Technique," How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Jason Earls, Pleroma Publications, 2007.