Bending notes with the neck.

It puts some relief on the neck to cause the tone to change. Randy Rhoads used this technique on Crazy Train (and I am sure other tunes as well). If you have last month's issue of Guitar World they did a video teaching Crazy Train (VERY well done I may add!) and the instructor talked about this. He said don't do this on skinny necks since it has been know to snap necks. I tried it on my Agile LP and it didn't take much to get the effect so I think I am safe. You shouldn't have to force it much. Rest your pick hand on the body (near the selector switch) and your left on the back of the headstock. I am barely putting any pressure. I would never try tis on a strat or anything else with a thin neck.

I am not very educated in guitar necks but heres my opinion.

If its a quality guitar, and set neck, I really dont think your hand pressure will effect it much. Strings not on the guitar for a certain period of time should effect the set up more then just a quick note bend. Plus whether you use your hand on the back of the set neck, or a tremelo i think they both have the same pricipal and obviously a tremelo isnt dangerous to a guitar so Id say Go have fun, its a gutiar, meant to be played.

Peace

M-Man

You're bending the truss rod, every time you do it. As it is made of metal and not spring steel, you run the risk of putting a permanently bend it, which isn't good for the neck relief. :cry:

this is tricky, because you relly dont want to yank on the neck. DO NOT grab your headstock and start bending the neck to no end. you will damage it. U2's The Edge does this technique very well. He pinches the headstock of his guitar and gently wiggles the entire guitar back and forth. it puts a gentle vibrato-type sound into the notes, and it wont compromise the structure of your guitar. anything more strenuous than that and i'd be concerned about damage.

You're bending the truss rod, every time you do it. As it is made of metal and not spring steel, you run the risk of putting a permanently bend it, which isn't good for the neck relief. :cry:

The neck doesn't move enough to even tweak the truss rod. The amount of pressure needed is so minimal it only SLIGHTLY bends the wood...and I do mean slightly. I think if you pushed hard enough to bend the truss rod the headstock would break off first.

You're bending the truss rod, every time you do it. As it is made of metal and not spring steel, you run the risk of putting a permanently bend it, which isn't good for the neck relief. :cry:

This is what I'm afraid of Greybeard. It doesn't seem logical. Like Mike said though, the pressure is very light. Perhaps, I'll meet halfway. Save my neck, and pick up a bigsby.

You're bending the truss rod, every time you do it. As it is made of metal and not spring steel, you run the risk of putting a permanently bend it, which isn't good for the neck relief. :cry:

The neck doesn't move enough to even tweak the truss rod. The amount of pressure needed is so minimal it only SLIGHTLY bends the wood...and I do mean slightly. I think if you pushed hard enough to bend the truss rod the headstock would break off first.

Greybeard's is correct, pushing forward is not a good idea -- pulling on the neck (but NOT at the headstock, BTW) is safer, IF the neck is built with an old-fashioned, one-way truss rod. That will flex only wood. Pushing forward enough to change pitch is either stretching the truss rod or compressing the wood in the neck. Pushing on the headstock of a mahogany-necked guitar is asking for trouble. You might be careful, but some kid who can't afford it will snap one. Not a technique to promote.

Mike, you say you would never do this with a Strat, but it's okay with a LP style guitar? You've got it completely backwards. Strat maple necks/headstocks are much tougher than mahogany necks. See if you can find anybody who's broken the headstock off of a Strat. Ask the same question about a mahogany-necked Gibby -- especially SG or LP.

For what it's worth, I've done it for years - Strats, Les Pauls, 335s even, and never had any problems...I don't have a guitar handy, but I'm pretty sure I put my hand just below the headstock joint (not on it).

Mike, you say you would never do this with a Strat, but it's okay with a LP style guitar? You've got it completely backwards. Strat maple necks/headstocks are much tougher than mahogany necks. See if you can find anybody who's broken the headstock off of a Strat. Ask the same question about a mahogany-necked Gibby -- especially SG or LP.

Again, get last month's issue of Guitar World. The instructor SPECIFICALLY said do not attempt with skinny necks and he mentioned strats. Strats have skinny necks...plus I don't think they are set necks (don't quote me on that) which in my opinion makes for a weaker neck. You may not break the headstock but it could break anywhere.

That is why in my post I I repeated said "slightest" and "minimal" pressure. It really does not take much. I'll bet fingering chords take more pressure than is needed to do this trick.

Somebody on the Temple of Blues board once said he had an old Masonite Dano suddenly come apart in his hands while doing this, after several years of doing it a lot. Just folded up in the middle.
:shock:

Again, get last month's issue of Guitar World. The instructor SPECIFICALLY said do not attempt with skinny necks and he mentioned strats. Strats have skinny necks...plus I don't think they are set necks (don't quote me on that) which in my opinion makes for a weaker neck. You may not break the headstock but it could break anywhere.

That is why in my post I I repeated said "slightest" and "minimal" pressure. It really does not take much. I'll bet fingering chords take more pressure than is needed to do this trick.

I certainly hope you don't believe everything you read, Mike. The author is plain wrong -- a Strat neck is much tougher than that of that a real Gibson LP. The simplistic description of "thin" necks should be the tip off here. Wood type can be and often is far more significant to neck strength than is thickness. This is very obvious to those who have worked with woods, and especially clear in the case of maple and mahogany. Get pieces of each in similar dimensions and do some breakage experiments. Maple is the tough stuff. Go a bit further and explore the differences in headstock geometries: Cut "headstock" joints into each in the typical fashions done by Fender and Gibson, and see what it takes to break those. In a Fender maple neck at least some of the neck grain runs straight through the length of headstock because the headstock is parallel to the neck, and only partially offset. This makes a maple neck and headstock assembly very stiff and strong. Unfortunately, it is also the reason for needing string trees. A Gibson-style headstock has long been known to be vulnerable to breakage for a number of reasons. In terms of structure, it is weakened by the way the neck grain runs out in the headstock -- runout of all the neck grain occurs a couple inches of the nut, making this area of the neck/headstock very vulnerable to breakage. This is further exacerbated by the hole for the truss rod adjustment. There is a good reason other guitar makers using mahogany necks (Taylor, Ibanez) have decided to splice on tilt-back headstocks -- this eliminates the headstock grain runout issue. I suspect the famous Martin diamond volute on the back of some models may have been designed to compensate for headstock/neck weakness (but again, this is my speculation). Cheaper guitars also have spliced on headstocks for a very different reason -- piecing allows use of a thinner -- thus cheaper -- piece of wood to make a tilt-back headstock. Luckily, it also happens to make these less expensive structures stronger than a one-piece design. IIRC, your LP is an Agile, right? It's probably got a stronger neck/headstock construction than a Gibby LP.

Moreover, let's not confuse neck thickness with neck attachment. In the direction of flex considered here, a properly connected bolt-on does not suffer in comparision to a set neck -- jerking the neck "up and down" in the plane of the body is a different matter (and some idiots actually do this for vibrato, but not for long).

If you are going to use the neck flex technique for string bending, the safest method, is pulling back on the neck around the area of the first fret -- no stress on the headstock; no stress on the trad truss rod, nothing too stressful for a neck/body joint.

This is an image from the Warmoth website (I hope they don't mind me using it) of a traditional truss rod. The neck shape is being held in 3 places - at each end of the rod and in the middle, where it pushes against the curve of the truss rod channel. As long as you have strings on your guitar (tuned, of course), the truss rod is under stress.
Tightening the truss rod adds pressure to the rod channel, which is compensated by the middle of the neck coming forward (pushing it towards a more "convex" profile. Loosening the rod, reduces the pressure on the rod channel and allows the neck to flex under string tension, which causes the middle of the neck to move backwards, in relation to the ends.
Pushing the headstock, on the other hand, offers no compensaton for the additional pressure, exerted on the truss rod/curved rod channel. Thinking about it the rod will suffer very little. It's metal and isn't going to stretch, so the pressure has to go somewhere - most likely into compression of the wood on the apex of the curve of the truss rod channel.

This is a situation very like a popular mechanics 101 problem involving two trees with a rope tied between them: A small amount of force pulling on the center of the rope translates into a much larger force along the rope. The mechanical force advantage [tension on rope versus the force needed to offset rope at center] approx. = (0.5*length of rope)/(offset distance at center of rope). Similarly for a truss rod, the greatest stress is applied axially along its length, so the rod's adjusting nut, anchor point and the neck wood in those areas bear the brunt of the burden. This means the wood around the adjusting nut and the anchor point are in the most danger of being compressed or split. I've seen a number of guitar necks with compressed and damaged wood around the truss rod adjusting nut -- presumably due to overtightening. In any case, it's a vulnerable area, as a slight bit of bending against the truss rod's center (e.g., pushing in the direction that increases relief) translates into a very large increase in truss rod tension.

Billy Sheehan(bassist) does this a lot.

He said with his old Fender P bass, he loosened the neck joint so much that he had picks and blades in the neck pocket to stop it from moving

I dont think he ever broke the neck on his P bass doing bends, however he did have a non standard (thicker) neck on it, His newer basses(the yamaha signature ones) seem to be designed to be bent