 Another way to apply vibrato, not just with your fingers, is to use a whammy bar, or more properly known as the vibrato arm or bar. To see the difference in standard notation and tablature as to whether to use the whammy bar or not for vibrato, it basically goes like this. If there's no indication, you use your fingers. If you're supposed to use the whammy bar, a note will be made. Normally, it says with whammy bar. You might see W-Foward slash whammy bar. Using the whammy bar to apply some vibrato is great when it would be hard for you to do it with your fingers. Let's say I was holding a note high up on the neck. I kind of don't have the room in the angle to start putting on a vibrato technique. Also, when I'm fretting a note on the high e-string, I don't have the vertical aspect because I'll fall off the neck when I go to pull the note down. To the rescue is the whammy bar. When you're starting to develop a whammy technique, when it comes to just straight up vibrato, I would highly suggest start practicing with the whammy bar in hand with anything that you're playing. Let's say I was just going down a scale. You might have penitonic. I use my finger for vibrato, but in hand, I had the bar ready to go. I'm merely resting my pick hand third and fourth fingers. Even sometimes I just have it hooked by my fourth finger and I have it at the ready whenever I need to use it. More often than not, that's just for a vibrato technique. Sometimes I like to do it when I'm holding a bend. I find it's much more consistent to use the whammy bar on a bend than it is to let my finger start letting the bend fall and pushing it back up. It's much easier to do it with the whammy bar. Speaking of instances where vibrato would be otherwise hard or impossible, chords, how do you do that? Use the whammy bar. Developing a technique where it's always in hand is a great way to go. Trying to go get it, to go grab it is a dangerous thing. It's not spontaneous. You're already too late if you're going to grab it. Think of it that way. Also, sometimes, depending on the mechanism, the whammy might be very loose and it's jumping all over the place or it could be very tight. Either way, you have total control if you have it in your hand the whole time.