 Hey guys, this is Pliny in this lesson where going to exonerate the whammy bar, which in my experience has started to get a really bad name amongst metal players who are trying to play sort of with modern taste, whatever that is. A lot of the guys that I teach or play with think of the whammy bar as this thing that you sort of had in the 80s as a waiter. And that's sort of it. You're either shaking it wildly or you play a fixed bridge, but like all the other techniques and articulations available to guitar players, I think the whammy bar can be a really important and fun way to further expand your sound. So we're going to use an example from a song or my call, Handmade Cities. And I'll sort of approach it in the way that the melody could be played with a fixed bridge and then with a whammy bar so you can hear the difference and maybe it'll convince you that next time you bend a note, you should do it with a bar instead of with your left hand. So if we look at the beginning of that melody, from a purely technical standpoint, if I want to go from a but I want that first note to be bent into, that would be quite difficult going. Especially if I want that final note to fall down as well and then I would have to go which is another interesting way of doing it, but it requires a lot of jumping and there's no way that it could really be done as fluidly because you have to go from fretting a note to already fretting a bent note. So with the whammy bar, you can do all that in a much more fluid way, which is really just servicing the melody rather than trying to be showy or anything like that. And so with all these little parts of the melody, like if we wanted to do that without the whammy bar, it would be which is pretty difficult to do. I'm barely even playing it at tempo and you're hearing all this useless string noise, but with the whammy bar you're able to get all these really fun inflections. Another really fun thing about the whammy bar is that when you hold a chord and sort of depress it or shake it because of the tension of the different strings, everything will fluctuate at a slightly different pitch. So rather than bending in a perfect octave or a perfect third, you get all these fairly disgusting dissonances, but with overdrive and delay they form really cool resonances. And I think that can turn into a, it almost sounds like a bunch of whales having a party. You can get these really fun sounds. So skipping ahead to the end of the melody. One of the, well another one of the really cool things about the whammy bar is if you slide while depressing it, you can maintain the pitch of the note, which is sort of fighting your left hand against your right hand. So it's an easy way to do that would be. And you get all these little weird things because you're not a robot and you're not perfect or at least I'm far from perfect. But it snaps to that note and that's a really fun way of articulating a slide rather than it's almost like nothing happens and then suddenly it happens. So skipping ahead to the end of the song there's this line. And one of the fun things about that is with the whammy bar, if you sort of take your two hands and put them in a cage match, you'll have your left hand sliding but the whammy bar going down and it won't be perfect but you'll leave the pitch almost in the same place. And you get a lot of really interesting sounds there because running across the frets, it's as though you're playing in your note but if you can get the whammy bar to come down at the same rate it's the same note. And I guess this sort of gargling sound is another thing that's not necessarily over the top but it's a cool way to phrase something as simple as a slide. So now I'll just show you a few sort of subtle ways that you can incorporate the whammy bar into improvising without necessarily having to wear leather pants or wearing leather pants and being tasteful or not wearing pants at all but I guess the point is that this little guy is your friend and can be used in a lot of different ways and that's kind of what makes the world a beautiful place. So to wrap up next time you're playing with a whammy bar maybe take a minute to do all the things that you do all the time like play a note but instead of doing something like a slide or a bend to see if you can almost replicate that with the whammy bar and then you end up with all these really cool new techniques and become the greatest guitar player in the world with no pants.