In today’s lead guitar lesson, I want to show you a cool way to add some flavor to your blues guitar playing in the style of Warren Haynes. He didn’t invent this style, but he sure is good at making it sound incredible.

I think he got this concept from listening to such blues greats as Freddie King, Buddy Guy, and Albert Collins who all took advantage of the mighty 1 1/2 step bend.

So what is it?

The 1 1/2 step bend is where you take a note and bend it up 3 frets. So if you are bending a C note on the 13th fret of the B String, then you would bend up to the 16th fret, Eb to get the target note. This creates a really cool sound that you will hear in the blues all the time. In particular by artists such as Freddie King, Buddy Guy, and Albert Collins. Bending helps create a vocal type sound on the guitar and is very important in the blues.

You simply can’t play blues without bending! Blues is about a feeling. Recreating the pain of life through your guitar is best done through bending and vibrato. Ever hear the phrase , “That guitar is screaming!”, well now you get what they are trying to convey.

Warren Haynes is an excellent example of someone who took this concept and made it into his own style. If you listen to Warren play a lot, you will definitely hear this in his playing all the time. He has perfected this technique, which requires excellent pitch and knowing exactly how far to bend the string to get the desired pitch.

By practicing bending and recognizing how far you have to bend a note to get the desired pitch, your fingers will develop a memory of how far each string should be bent to get the intended pitch. This needs to be practiced daily until you can perform these bends without thinking.

Below is a common used bending technique like Warren would use over a slow blues in C.

Listen and Watch this lick below. For optimal viewing click the Fullscreen button in the bottom right and enable HD in the top right corner.

If you want to learn more about playing lead blues guitar, I have developed over 10 hours of lessons in my blues guitar DVD course to unlock the mystery of creating and improvising lead blues guitar.  Check them out here.