Guitar Nerds Anonymous

Best simple hands-on tip I can give is to use two fingers for your bends and three fingers for vibrato... Does that make sense?

As others have noted use lots of fingers for bending ("supporting the bend" or the "giant finger" as Paul Gilbert puts it). To practice bending accurately, play the note you want to bend to e.g., A as 10th fret on the 2nd string, to get the sound in your ear, then play the bend e.g., G bent a whole step up to A from the 8th fret on the 2nd string, and check that you get the same result (a tuner can be a useful double check if your relative pitch is as shaky as mine). Do that up and down a scale and all over the fretboard to get a feel for it. Also think about what you want your bend to sound like. Do you want to go straight up into the bend or do you want the unbent note to sound clearly first and then bend up to the new note a la David Gilmour.

For vibrato, the motion generally comes from the wrist. You'll have a speed that you're most comfortable at, but try faster and slower to check what sounds best. Check that when you finish a vibrato you're ending up on a note that you actually want otherwise it will sound weird. So, using the bend above, if you're bending from a G to an A and then the vibrato is letting that bend soften slightly so you're vibratoing between A and G#, finish it on the A, not on a slightly-flat-A otherwise it won't segue nicely into the next phrase.

Any tips for improving bending

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tELIgr96WcM