Physicist shows you how to be a better guitarist with the help of science!

My Guitar Lessons has been made aware of a study that has revealed the advantages in playing techniques like string bends, tapping, vibrato and whammy. Guitarist and physicist, Dr David Robert Grimes, has said that very good guitarists would manipulate the strings to make the instrument sing. He explained that on a piano, there are twelve notes in a scale, but on a guitar, you can bend the strings to get the notes in between. He went on to say that, he wanted to understand what it was about the guitar techniques that allowed a guitarist to manipulate pitch.

Dr Grimes came up with equations showing how string bending, vibrato and whammy bars changed the pitch of a note and saw that the properties of the strings had a massive effect on the change in pitch, in particular the Young’s modulus (a measure of how much the string stretches under pressure) and how thick the gauge of the strings were.

He found out how easy hammer-ons and pull-offs were, depending on the height of the guitar strings above the finger board. And he confirmed the equation for string bends, measuring the frequency of the sound produced for strings bent through different angles on a guitar.

The vibrating strings and string instruments had been long understood, but no body had worked out on how effects like bending the string change the pitch of the sound and how that depended on the tension of the string, the force applied, and the angle through which it was bent.

The entire study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Here is David Robert Grimes playing the guitar;

http://youtu.be/LmppqI__kVY?list=UUov36XlPAeZ5GRUkD8yG2Eg