Vibrato

You absolutely DO NOT need a whammy bar. The best vibratos in the business come from players who never use whammies (B.B. King, Eric Clapton ect...).

There are many ways to vibrato. To start off, you just play a note and while that note is ringing out, bend the string up and down on the fretboard (using your index finger to start). Practice it with all your fingers after you get the gist.

Have you tried fingering a note and just vibrating your hand with kind of a shaking motion. Your really don't have to move the string (or note) very far to acieve the technique. It mainly just takes practice. One of my favorite things to do is when I'm doing say a bar chord I'll pull and release the note that's under my index finger or sometimes I'll do this with the whole chord.

Joe

When I do the vibrato described by Joe on my acoustic guitars, the vibrato is clearly hearable but when I do it on my electric I get a very small vibraton.
Could it be that the electric has lower string hight and softer strings (0.09) compared to acoustics higher string hight and harder strings (0.12) ?
To get any vibration on the electric I need to hold the pressing finger very close to the fret and rotate the wrist very much.

IMHO this is one of the best explanations, from the Fender Player's Club - http://www.fenderplayersclub.com/pdfs/lessons/vibrato.pdf - includes audio examples, too!

If you play with a light touch you can also achieve a nice vibrato by just increasing and decreasing the pressure on the finger that is fretting the note. No need to bend the strings up and down at all. You are actually bending them in (towards the fret board) slightly.

What has been giving me fits lately is a vibrato at the end of a full step bend.

Mike

Teleplayer 324 posted an excellent video a while ago, where BB King expalins how he does it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRFceS16Aok&search=Guitar .

Priceless 8)

When I do the vibrato described by Joe on my acoustic guitars, the vibrato is clearly hearable but when I do it on my electric I get a very small vibraton.
Could it be that the electric has lower string hight and softer strings (0.09) compared to acoustics higher string hight and harder strings (0.12) ?
To get any vibration on the electric I need to hold the pressing finger very close to the fret and rotate the wrist very much.

Yes, it needs a bit more work on an electric. I've seen guitarists playing live who are waving their arms around like traffic cops and it's made no audible difference to the note, so it's worth working at.

A :-)