Wham-O-Rama
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In this lesson were going to get out the whammy bar and start learning whammy bar tricks like dives, screams, and flutters in the style of great guitarists like Eddie Van Halen.
I’ve always seen the whammy bar as one of the most fun thing to learn on the guitar. It’s not too complicated and the sounds you can make using just a few basic secrets and tricks are pleasing to audiences everywhere.
As always, I’m not limiting you to just learning a bunch of tricks your locked into playing with no room for creativity. I’ll show you how to create variations to inject your own creativity and style into the music you play.
Then we put it to use in a musical way by showing using it with a jam track to prepare you for real-life jamming situations.
So let’s dive in!
October 10, 2019 @ 2:36 pm
Good Lesson ! I’ve never thought about using the Whammy Bar, (Tremolo Arm), for much more than accents: Like in Surf, Starting the main Riff for the “Peter Gunn Theme”, and occasional Am in “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, and sometimes on the last note of a song as is fades out. Playing with a pick and holding the Tremolo Arm seems strange because I haven’t practiced. I’m accustomed to playing Gretsch guitars with Bigsby Tremolo Arms which seem more rigid than the ones used on G&L, Ibanez, & DiPinto Guitars. Just have to watch this a few more times and practice, especially the Harmonic Effects, to see how I can use it with whatever I play.
October 11, 2019 @ 11:24 am
Great Len! Yeah if you get creative, you can do a lot of really cool things with the bar
July 16, 2015 @ 5:43 am
Good introductory lesson to the Whammy Bar (i.e. Tremolo Arm).
It provides new Whammy users (like me) with a bunch of cool ideas to run and play with. I especially like the Whammy harmonics effects. I’ll have to try it on chord fragments and double stops too. A discussion (another lesson perhaps) on setting up a whammy bar to drop or raise a note to a (maximum) user specified pitch (i.e. drop a 3rd, 5th, octave etc.), if that’s even possible, would be useful to me.
Thanks.
July 16, 2015 @ 8:22 pm
Thanks for the comment Bob!
November 15, 2013 @ 7:08 pm
awesome lesson/./. quite new to me
November 15, 2013 @ 7:58 pm
Thanks Nash! Glad you like it