
The video lesson below is for keyboard players who want to “properly” use the pitch-bend wheel on their electronic synths or other keyboard. By “properly,” I mean that you can’t just randomly roll that pitch wheel around and expect your keyboard licks to make any sense (outside of cartoonish sound effects).
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The keyboards in this list are personally recommended by me. They are Yamaha keyboards, which I swear by (no affiliation there).
If you want the professional sound of a killer solo when using a pitch-bend wheel, it’s a great idea to emulate the kind of pitch-bends that are used by experienced lead guitarists, sax players, and the like. That’s the secret, and there’s some detailed explanation of certain ways to do that included in the video below.
IMPORTANT TIP: I highly recommend you master a least a couple of prepared licks before you “go live” with any kind of pitch-bending. Otherwise, you may end up in Cartoon Sound Effect Land, and you will probably UN-impress your audience. They may not even know why, but they will definitely be thinking “amateur.” Ouch! Just take some time to get a few of these things down beforehand, instead of going right out and “tone-randomizing” your audience with non-skilled pitch bends. If there was a Geneva Convention about audience torture, you can be sure they would ban that.
In the video, I discuss the most important aspects of exactly how the use of pitch wheels works, and I cover a few useful riffing concepts using “whole-step” bends (explained in the video) .
Below the video, I’ve included my response to some people who are asking “where’s Part Two?” on YouTube. In my response, you will find some additional tips on doing “half-step” bends.
Note, the first video (the one below), is NO LONGER ON YOUTUBE, because I am gradually moving access to most of my YouTubes into the realm of this website only.
Here’s that selected reply of mine (from when this video was on YouTube).
