I don't think many people have figured out that I do this “pre-bending” thing ... and I'm not aware of anyone doing it ... with the possible exception of Jeff Beck ... but he tends to achieve the same kind of thing but mainly with the whammy bar ... his Where Were You? must be the most incredibly piece of electric guitar recorded, ever. But as for me ... well, I also have to tell you I don't always get it right. It depends on a lot of things. As with any playing, but especially string bending, if you can't hear clearly what you are doing, you are sunk. So good monitoring is a vital requirement. We are fortunate in having a superb Monitor engineer, but of course there are still times when the acoustics of a hall or arena conspire to blur things, enough to make judgement of bends difficult. Secondly, it depends on knowing your instrument very well ... mine has been with me so long, that it is almost a part of me. I always use the same strings, and the guitar always gives me what I ask of it. So the “memory”, of how far a given bend will need to go to produce a bent note of a certain pitch, is at least partly in the muscles of the fingers. Its [sic] also, I think, updated by the few bends which you have just played, with “bio-feedback” allowing you to correct the pitch as you go along. But in the end, I think it has to be quite largely instinct. On a good day, everything is sweet and it's impossible to go wrong. On a bad day when you're not hearing stuff well, I find you can come off feeling that almost nothing was quite right!!! SO, like most things, you prepare, you plan, you think, you do everything to give yourself the best chance, but in the end, it's “In the Lap of the Gods” - and it helps to realise this .... “admitting powerlessness” is a powerful technique at the very least, and can become a whole way of life. I subscribe to that belief - and try to act on it when I can. By the way, thinking about it, my “pre-bends” go back a long way .... there are some (mutitracked!) on The Night Comes Down on the first Queen album ... and White Queen on Queen II ... and they are an essential part of the solo in Killer Queen. But Last Horizon has the hardest ones to pull off live!!