Whammy Bar Usage

The whammy bar (also called the vibrato bar, tremolo bar, wham bar, etc) is a rather difficult tool to use, but a very powerful one for an electric guitarist. You can use it to produce all sorts of sounds and effects that are not possible by any other means on a guitar. If is tough to learn at first, and does require a lot of practice and experience to use really effectively, beyond the generic dives used by some guitarists. However, if you put the effort into it, it is a wonderful addition to any rock guitarists solo techniques.

Tools of the Trade
In order to use these techniques, you need a whammy bar, there is no way to do them otherwise. A few are doable by literally bending the guitar neck, but those are more difficult to learn to do and you need to accept that those techniques will likely either destroy or at least ruin that particular guitar beyond repair. These types of bridges are pretty much only found on electric guitars, with acoustic guitarists generally having to use the above mentioned neck bending technique.

These come in two varieties floating bridges and non-floating bridges. Non-floating bridges are the more traditional Fender Stratocaster style bridges. These more or less have the characteristics and advantages of a fixed bridge (other than usually slightly lower sustain), but allow the guitarist to push down on the bar to decrease the string pitch. The floating bridges, more common on Ibanez and Jackson style Super-Strats, allows a guitarist to pull up and push down on the bar to increase and decrease the string pitch. The cheaper versions of these bridges tend to have tuning problems, but the higher quality ones are very stable. They do eventually go bad and do require more maintenance, but the advantages are usually enough for most guitarists that favor them to outweigh the disadvantages.

Using a Whammy Bar
One thing to keep in mind with these bridges, especially the floating bridges, is that you don’t want to be in contact with them unless you are palm muting or actually using it. You can still mess around with the pitch by accident, even with non-floating bridges, so it is best to develop a technique that doesn’t require resting your hand on the bridge.

Practicing with them has to be done completely by ear, as well, which is why this is generally a more advanced guitarist tool. Outside of very basic dips and dives, you need to be able to hear when the desired note is reached and stop at that point. The best way to build up the skill and ear training to do this is likely to just pick a random three note sequence on the same string, and play it normally a few times. That is to sa