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Guitar Articulation Reference: Vibrato vs Tremolo & 20 More
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About this reference
From the music-learning collection, adapted for Philojain Music Muse. Referenced sources remain credited in the article.
Playing & Technique · Reference
Every guitar-technique glossary lists the same 20-odd names. This one starts with the mix-up that causes the most confusion — vibrato vs tremolo, and why your Stratocaster's whammy bar has had the wrong name on it since the 1950s — then gives you a sortable, filterable table of 21 techniques by hand, effect, and notation.
Ghost note vs dead note is flagged as a blurry, overlapping pair rather than forced into a false-precise distinction — see the ledger row and FAQ.
01 — The Mix-Up Worth Fixing First
Two effects, two names, swapped.
Vibrato modulates pitch. Tremolo modulates volume. They are physically different phenomena — and guitar culture has been calling them by each other's names for seven decades.
Vibrato — pitch modulation
The note's pitch rises and falls slightly around its target — the wobble you hear as a "singing" sustain. Volume is unaffected.
Tremolo — amplitude modulation
The pitch stays fixed (the fast carrier wave never widens or narrows); only the loudness envelope (dashed guide) swells and fades.
Why the names are backwards
Fender's spring-loaded bridge lever — the arm on a Stratocaster — has been marketed as a “synchronized tremolo” since 1954. What it actually does is slacken and tighten all six strings at once, changing their tension and therefore their pitch. By definition, that's vibrato, not tremolo. At the same time, some vintage Fender amplifiers labelled their volume-oscillating circuit “vibrato” when the effect it produces — a regular rise and fall in loudness with no pitch change — is textbook tremolo. Both names are swapped, on both ends of the signal chain, and the mix-up has been documented and re-explained by guitar manufacturers and technical writers for decades because the original naming never got corrected.34
02 — The Full Reference
21 techniques, sortable.
Search a technique, filter by which hand does the work, or sort any column.
| Staccato | Either — a duration marking, executed by cutting a note short | Note duration — shortened and detached from the next note | A dot above or below the notehead5 | Short, punchy, detached attacks |
| Legato | Fretting hand primarily — notes connected via hammer-ons/pull-offs rather than re-picked | Removes the pick attack between connected notes | A curved slur line over the notes5 | Smooth, flowing, connected phrasing |
| Hammer-on | Fretting hand | Sounds a higher note by finger force alone, no pick strike | Slur plus “H”7 | Smooth ascending note, softer attack than a picked note |
| Pull-off | Fretting hand | Sounds a lower (open or fretted) note via a plucking release motion, no pick strike | Slur plus “P”7 | Smooth descending note, softer attack |
| Slide / glissando | Fretting hand — finger keeps constant pressure while moving along the string | Pitch moves continuously between two notes, no gap | Diagonal line between noteheads, or “gliss.”5 | Smooth, continuous pitch glide connecting two notes |
| Portamento | The general classical/vocal term for the same continuous glide; on guitar it is functionally identical to a slide | Continuous pitch glide between notes | Straight line; more common in vocal/orchestral scores5 | Identical sonic result to a slide — the words overlap by tradition, not by physics |
| Bend | Fretting hand — pushes or pulls the string sideways, raising its tension | Raises the pitch of a fretted note without moving frets | Curved arrow up from the note, with a fraction (¼, ½, full)7 | Vocal-like pitch rise; a quarter-tone microtonal bend produces the blues “blue note” |
| Vibrato | Fretting hand (finger/wrist rocking), or picking hand via a whammy bar | Pitch oscillates in a small, controlled range around the target note | Wavy horizontal line above the note1 | A “singing,” sustained, alive quality — see Section 01 |
| Trill | Fretting hand — rapid alternation, usually via fast hammer-on/pull-off | Rapid alternation between a note and the note above it | “tr” above the note, sometimes with a wavy line5 | Rapid, shimmering oscillation between two adjacent pitches |
| Tremolo picking | Picking hand — very fast, repeated alternate picking of one note or chord | Re-articulates the same pitch rapidly and repeatedly; not a pitch or amplitude modulation in the strict acoustic sense, but named after the older orchestral tremolo (rapid bow re-articulation) | Three slashes through the note stem2 | Buzzing, sustained intensity; simulates sustain or adds aggression |
| Palm muting | Picking hand — edge of the palm rests lightly on the strings near the bridge while picking | Dampens string vibration, shortens sustain, reduces overtones | “P.M.” with a dashed line over the affected notes6 | Tight, percussive, chugging low end |
| Ghost note | Either — fretting hand touches a string without full pressure, or picking hand strikes a muted string | Pitch is obscured or indeterminate; mostly rhythmic attack remains | Notehead in parentheses, or an “x” notehead8 | Percussive thump with little or no clear pitch, used rhythmically |
| Dead note | Fretting hand rests lightly across strings without pressing to a fret | Pitch is fully eliminated; a pure percussive click remains | “x” notehead8 | Percussive, pitchless thud — overlaps heavily with ghost note across sources; see FAQ |
| Rake | Picking hand drags the pick across muted strings just before the target note | Adds a brief percussive scrape immediately before the real attack | Diagonal line or grace-note cluster labelled “rake”9 | Scratchy pick-up into the target note; adds aggression |
| Slur (notation term) | Fretting hand in practice — but this is a notation-and-terminology entry, not an independent physical technique | Nothing new physically — it's the classical-notation umbrella term meaning “play these connected, without a separate attack,” which legato, hammer-ons and pull-offs all fall under on guitar | Curved line over or under the noteheads5 | N/A — describes legato-family technique in general, listed here because it appears on the same term lists |
| Natural harmonic | Fretting hand touches a string lightly exactly at a node (12th, 7th, 5th fret) without pressing, picking hand plucks | Isolates an overtone instead of the fundamental, by damping the fundamental at a node | Diamond-shaped notehead, or “Harm.”9 | Bell-like, pure, chiming tone above the open or fretted pitch |
| Pinch harmonic | Picking hand — thumb or pick-edge briefly touches the string right after picking | Also isolates an overtone, but via the picking hand's follow-through rather than a node touch | “P.H.” above the note, sometimes a diamond notehead9 | Shrieking, squealing harmonic, common in rock/metal lead lines |
| Drone | Either — a sustained or repeated open string or pedal note left ringing under other movement | Nothing moves — a continuous, unchanging pitch sustained beneath other activity | Sustained note or tie; open-string notehead held1 | Constant harmonic anchor — folk, metal low strings, Indian classical tanpura |
| Whammy bar / dive bomb | Picking hand operates a spring-loaded bridge lever | Pitch of all strings drops (or rises) together, unlike a single-string fretting-hand bend; a dive bomb is an extreme, dramatic downward plunge | “w/bar” with a downward arrow/squiggle graphic3 | Dramatic siren-like pitch plunge or rise — a hard-rock/metal solo hallmark |
| Sweep picking | Picking hand makes one continuous stroke across adjacent strings, synced with the fretting hand rolling off each note | Lets fast arpeggios cross strings with one economical motion instead of alternate-picking every note | Continuous slanted arrow labelled “sweep”10 | Fast, fluid, cascading arpeggio texture |
| Tapping | Both hands fret notes directly on the fretboard — the picking hand also hammers onto frets | Extends reachable range and speed beyond one hand alone | “T” above the note, sometimes with a “+” for a following hammer/pull11 | Rapid, wide-interval legato lines with percussive attack from both hands |
Method: definitions are drawn from the cited manufacturer and reference sources, cross-checked against each other where more than one covers the same technique. Two entries carry an honest flag rather than a clean, unqualified definition: “slur” is included as the notation-umbrella term rather than a fully independent technique, and ghost note/dead note are marked as overlapping because sources genuinely disagree on where the line falls. See FAQ and Sources.
Deeper — Three Shapes Behind One Bend Row
The bend row above hides three different notation shapes
The ledger lists “bend” with one notation description — a curved arrow and a fraction — accurate for the most common case but not the whole picture. Per the MuseScore Studio Handbook's guitar-notation reference, a standard bend “connects two notes together: a starting note and an arrival note,” shown as a curve between them with the bend amount (½ for a semitone, 1 for a whole tone, and so on) marked above it on the tab staff.
A pre-bend is a different shape entirely: the string is bent to pitch before it's picked, so there's no audible attack at the lower note at all. On the standard stave it's written as “a stemless, parenthesised grace note”; on the tab stave, a straight arrow replaces the curved one, marking the silent pre-bend rather than an audible glide into it. A third variant, the grace-note bend, is used when a bend “doesn't have a defined rhythmic duration” — played quickly, just before the beat, rather than timed against it, with the grace-note entry itself conventionally positioned “one diatonic step lower than the note it precedes” so the eye can tell at a glance roughly how far the bend travels before the curve or arrow spells it out precisely.
Deeper — Why The Distinction Holds
Why the distinction is worth keeping straight
Mixing up a standard bend and a pre-bend on the page describes two audibly different phrases — one glides up into a note you hear arrive, the other starts already at pitch with no glide audible at all — exactly the kind of gap between what's written and what's heard this reference tries to close everywhere else in the table above.
It's also a useful check against the vibrato/tremolo mix-up Section 01 spends a whole section correcting: three symbols in the same small notation family (standard bend, pre-bend, grace-note bend) that look superficially alike on the page but mean three different physical actions on the string is precisely the kind of near-identical notation this whole reference exists to pull apart.
03 — Common Questions
Asked mid-practice.
What's the actual difference between vibrato and tremolo?
Vibrato is a small, regular oscillation in pitch — the note wobbles slightly sharp and flat around its centre. Tremolo is a small, regular oscillation in volume — the pitch stays fixed but the loudness swells and fades. One modulates frequency, the other modulates amplitude; they are physically different effects that happen to sound superficially similar at a glance.
Why does my Stratocaster's whammy bar say "tremolo" if it's actually doing vibrato?
Because Fender's naming has been swapped since the 1950s. The spring-loaded bridge lever Fender calls a "synchronized tremolo" actually changes string tension and therefore pitch — that's vibrato by definition. Meanwhile, some vintage Fender amplifiers labelled their volume-oscillating circuit "vibrato" when it was actually amplitude modulation — that's tremolo by definition. Both names are backwards, and guitar culture inherited the mix-up wholesale.
What's the difference between a ghost note and a dead note?
The two terms overlap heavily across sources and are often used interchangeably for a muted, pitchless percussive attack. Where a distinction is drawn, "dead note" more often refers to a fully muted string with no pitch at all, while "ghost note" can also describe a note played so quietly its pitch is barely audible rather than fully eliminated — but this line is genuinely blurry, and this page states that plainly rather than inventing false precision.
What is a "blue note" and how is it played on guitar?
A blue note is a pitch bent slightly below the standard minor or major third, fifth, or seventh of a scale — often landing in the microtonal space between two conventional pitches. On guitar it's produced with a partial, quarter-tone-scale bend: pushing or pulling the string just enough to raise pitch a fraction rather than a full step, characteristic of blues phrasing.
What's the difference between a hammer-on and a slide?
A hammer-on sounds a new, higher fretted pitch by striking the string with a fretting-hand finger, with a distinct (if softer) attack at the new pitch. A slide keeps constant contact and pressure on the string while moving to a new fret, producing a continuous pitch glide with no separate attack at all — the difference between a stepped move and a smear.
04 — Sources
Where these facts come from
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — “Vibrato”britannica.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — “Tremolo”britannica.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Fender.com — “Tremolo vs. Vibrato: What's the Difference?”fender.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Seymour Duncan Tone Blog — “Tremolo vs. Vibrato: What's the Difference?”seymourduncan.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Dolmetsch Online — Music Theory Dictionary (staccato, legato, portamento, slur, trill, glissando)dolmetsch.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Jamie Humphries, “How to palm mute on guitar,” Guitar Worldguitarworld.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Fender.com — guitar technique guide: hammer-ons, pull-offs and string bendsfender.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Premier Guitar — ghost notes and dead notes in rhythm guitar — link did not resolve on 15 September 2026premierguitar.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Guitar World — natural and pinch harmonics technique guide — link did not resolve on 15 September 2026guitarworld.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Premier Guitar — sweep picking fundamentals — link did not resolve on 15 September 2026premierguitar.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Fender.com — two-handed tapping technique guidefender.com · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- Open Music Theory — Glossary (ornamentation and articulation vocabulary)viva.pressbooks.pub · accessed 26 Jul 2026
- MuseScore Studio Handbook, “Guitar bends & dives”handbook.musescore.org · accessed 11 Aug 2026
About this page: the vibrato/tremolo naming mix-up is independently documented by both a manufacturer (Fender) and a components maker (Seymour Duncan), which is why it is stated here as settled rather than disputed. Two entries (slur; ghost note vs dead note) are deliberately presented with their real ambiguity intact rather than smoothed into false precision.
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