Bending guitar strings is one of the most important and coolest guitar techniques you can learn. It’s essential in the blues, rock’n’roll, metal, and guitar solos are almost unimaginable without it. Its importance and omnipresence make it a key technique to learn, but it can sometimes be hard for a beginner to grasp because bending can get somewhat painful if you’re not used to it.
Bend guitar strings without hurting your fingers by setting up your guitar properly. Fresh strings and comfortable action and frets will help along with good technique. Use more than one finger and bend from your wrist and have patience and let calluses develop.
If you’ve just started learning this amazing guitar technique but aren’t sure if you can continue because of the pain, look no further. I’ll go over how to set up your guitar and adapt your technique to minimize or eliminate pain so you can play some amazing solos in no time.
Related: for the full overview, see our self-taught guitar roadmap.
3 Steps On How To Bend Guitar Strings Without Hurting Your Fingers
- Make Sure Your Guitar Is in Good Shape and Properly Set Up For Bending Strings: Check Your strings, make sure the action isn’t too high, inspect the fret height, and try down-tuning the guitar.
- Correct Your Technique When Bending Guitar Strings: Don’t rely on one finger and use your wrist.
- Let Calluses Develop To Easily Bend Guitar Strings: Learn on acoustic guitar, keep the nails on the fretting hand short, wipe your fingertips with rubbing alcohol, use an old credit card, and use thicker strings.
1. Make Sure Your Guitar Is in Good Shape and Properly Set Up To Easily Bend the Strings Without Hurt
If your guitar is in horrible condition, everything you play will feel uncomfortable and painful. Old rusty strings and frets that have been eaten away by time and overuse, coupled with improperly adjusted bridge and nut will turn your guitar playing into torture.
Let’s look at some key factors that will make bending much easier when you take care of them.
Check Your Strings
Of course, your guitar isn’t necessarily in such bad condition if you have trouble bending strings. However, one element in bad shape is enough to ruin the pleasure of playing. Quite often, it’s the strings.
No matter your style of playing, having a fresh set of strings on your guitar will help. Whenever something feels weird or off, check your strings. Over time, oil, sweat, and tiny pieces of skin from your fingers will accumulate in the windings, degrading them.
They might even rust if you are reckless with your guitar strings. Rusty strings aren’t just bad for your sound; they can be potentially bad for your health if you cut yourself accidentally. Therefore, clean your strings regularly and change when you hear a noticeable drop in sound quality.
It also helps to choose thinner strings. It makes sense that the thinner they are, the more bendable they are. However, if you get too thin strings, they may break relatively easily, so don’t go overboard with that.
Make Sure the Action Isn’t Too High
The guitar’s action is also an important factor. Action refers to how close to the frets or how far away from them the strings are. If the strings are close to the frets, we call that low action, and if they’re far away, it’s high action.
High action makes all types of fretting more difficult. The further away from the frets a string is, the more strength it takes to press and hold it. It’s even more difficult if you’re supposed to bend with high action.
Therefore, you want your guitar to have low action to make bending easier. Of course, you should not go too low. Otherwise, you’ll get a different host of problems, but lowering them will definitely alleviate some of them.