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The whammy bar can be used to drop (and raise on some bridges) the pitch of all 6 strings. It allows a number of techniques to enhance one's playing.
The whammy bar is very difficult to represent in tab. I recommend doing so exclusively above or below tab. However, you may see things like this:
--5---\1/--\1/---5---/1\--/1\--
This initially looks like a slide down to the first fret, but you can see that it's followed by an upward slide to nothing. This actually represents a quick whole step dip by pushing the bar downwards. So in the above example, you'd pick the 5th fret note, dip a whole step twice, pick the note again, then pull up on the bar to make two whole step peaks.
For tab that heavily uses the whammy bar, it's common to see ''s'' used in place of ''/'' and ''\'' to indicate slides. Then all ''/''s and ''\''s indicate whammy bar dips or rises.
== Techniques ==