10X Your Flatpicking Skills By Using THIS Practice Tool

Hey y'all, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today with another bluegrass flatpicking lesson. So what I've got for you today is gonna be a little shorter and a lot more simple than the stuff that I normally share on this channel. It's gonna be a lot less dense. I'm not gonna be showing you a whole bunch of, you know, note-for-note licks and phrases and solos and tunes in this. However, I really do think that this is one of the most important and one of the most valuable lessons that I've ever shared on this channel. All of that being said, I know a lot of people are gonna want to learn that first solo that I played at the beginning of the video. So if you would like to get the tabs for that totally for free, I've got that for you down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. I want to show you is a tool that you can use that will make your practicing way more fun and will almost guarantee that you improve your timing. And that is a really, really, really important thing when it comes to bluegrass guitar. Um, I certainly do not claim to have the best timing in the world, but I do try to work on it on a daily basis. And if you'll stay to the end of the video, I've got a, um, I've got kind of a little, um, a cool story that I would like to share with you to kind of, um, illustrate the point here. And so the tool that I like to use, again, to make practicing bluegrass guitar way more fun and to almost guarantee that you play in time and that it improves your timing is what's called a train beat. Um, now if you're not sure what a train beat is, let me play one here for you real quick. I've got this just kind of going through my Bluetooth speaker here. That's a train beat. That snare drum spelling out those 16th notes. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and. All right, so that is what a train beat is, and it is absolutely one of my favorite things to practice bluegrass guitar with. I also love practicing the chicken picking stuff along with this. One of the great things about practicing along with this train beat here is the drummer is spelling out the downbeats, the 1, 2, 3, 4, with the kick drum. But then he's actually spelling out the 16th notes, the 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a, on the snare drum. And those 16th notes are almost always what we're playing lead as, rhythmically speaking, in bluegrass guitar. So he's spelling all of that out rhythmically. And if you'll practice along with that, you can either put an earbud in your ear, or you can kind of do like I do in a crank up my Bluetooth speaker. I'm not sure how my neighbors feel about that, but you know, hey. And if you practice along with that where you can really hear that, it almost forces you to play in time. So real quick, I've got a train beat here. This is at 80 beats per minute, and I'm just gonna go through a couple of simple picking exercises, and I'm gonna play like a tune and a solo along with this train beat just to illustrate to you um, how you can do the same thing here. All right, so here we go. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start off just picking some basic open strings here, just— and that just gets me used to playing along with that. We can maybe a little cross picking. So there's just a couple of really simple picking exercises that you can practice along with this train beat to, you know, start to get your picking technique dialed in, but also really, really start to develop your timing there. I just like that because again, that snare drum is spelling out those 16th notes and it just makes it more fun to practice with, in my opinion. So let's do, um, let's do a tune here. Now I know I don't have the capo on, but, um, I'm gonna go ahead and play Red Haired Boy along with this train beat here. So we'll do— all right, all right, Red Haired Boy. We'll do 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, so let's do like a Tony Rice solo. Let's do Nine Pound Hammer. Tony Rice, Nine Pound Hammer. Let's do So you get the idea. There. And it doesn't matter if it's a picking exercise, which you can check out my 10 of My Favorite Picking Exercises video that I've done on this channel here. Whether it's a fiddle tune, whether it is a solo, whether it's a lick, I really do believe that practicing that along with the train beat is going to be a net positive. Again, it makes it more fun and it almost forces you to play in time. And having a good sense of timing is really, really, really crucial when it comes to bluegrass guitar. So I really like playing along with the train beat even more so than a metronome. Now practicing along with a metronome is great, but let me just show you the difference here, okay? So now I'm gonna play a couple of those ideas that I was just playing along with the train beat, but I'm gonna play them along with just the metronome here. All right, start off with some basic picking exercises. Red-haired boy? Let's do Tony Raskin on Panhammer. 3, 4. So it's still a great thing to practice along with. Um, it's— and, and you should practice along with the metronome because where the metronome— or in this case I just had it spelling out the downbeats— it really forces you to lock in with your 16th notes. Um, but I enjoy the train beat better because that drummer is spelling out those 16th notes and, um, and, and it just kind of forces you to play in time with it. So it's something that I try to use every single day. And here's the thing too, um, a lot of people when they're learning this, they'll say, Aaron, you know, you're playing it 80 beats a minute, I need something way slower than that. No problem at all. Here's a train beat at 50 beats a minute. Okay, 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a. So I have seen these as slow as 40 beats a minute, and I've seen them as fast as 190 beats a minute. You can get them all over the place on YouTube for free. I know there's metronome apps that have, you know, the option to where you can have kind of a train beat Beat thing, you know, play on the metronome. It— the specific one that you use doesn't matter. The most important thing is that you start incorporating this into your practicing. Again, it makes it way more fun and it practically forces you to play in time. So that brings me to the part of the lesson here, um, just, just a quick little story that I wanted to share with you. So Way back in the day when I was a teenager and I started getting into bluegrass, I got really into Brian Sutton and I got into all the Ricky Skaggs records and I tried to start playing along with those. Now, if I could go back in time, that, that stuff is great music. Like, I love, love, love those, those Kentucky Thunder records. But a lot of the music on that is like stupidly fast. It is absurdly fast. And so I would sit around and I would try to play along with like Ricky's version of Pig in a Pen, which I went and clocked that the other day, um, uh, just to see how fast it was, the original studio recording. And it was like in between 185 and 190 beats per minute. It is stupidly fast. So I say all of that to say I had developed some chops for sure, but I was, I was trying to, um, I was really trying to kind of punch above my weight and I had developed this tendency to rush everything. I still have a little bit of a tendency to do that. I still play very on top of the beat, and sometimes I tend to speed up. Um, but anyway, so I was doing that when I was a teenager living in East Texas, and I was the only person I knew who liked this kind of music. And then I moved up to East Tennessee to be part of the bluegrass program at East Tennessee State University, and, um, um you know, in my first year there, you know, kind of my— I developed a reputation of like, yeah, he's, he's good and he can play pretty fast, pretty clean, uh, but he has timing issues. So fortunately, I had a teacher named Dave Yates, you know, big shout out to Dave. And I was in lessons with him one day, and you know, he did— he didn't like scold me or chastise me for having timing issues. He just, um, you know, this was probably 20 years ago, probably probably longer than 20 years ago. And he had like an old— I don't know if it was like a Yamaha— it was a keyboard, but it had like drum tracks on there with like a bunch of different styles, and one of them was bluegrass. And there was one day he came into lessons and he had that thing and he had it like plugged into some external speaker. You know, this was before the internet— it wasn't before the internet, but it was before, you know, we had as many resources as we have now. And he just kind of turned on that train beat cranked it up through that speaker, and he goes, let's play along with this. He goes, what I love about this tool is that it just kind of forces you to play in time. And we started playing some fiddle tunes like Gold Rush and Big Mine and all that other kind of stuff. And I was like, man, this, this actually is fun, and it does force you to play in time. So after my first year there at ETSU, I went home that summer, and I had, I had a keyboard that could basically do the same thing, and I just practiced along with that train beat. All summer. And then when I came back the following year, just everybody was like, dang, man, your timing has really, really improved. And it just showed me that, you know, no matter what your strengths and weaknesses are, you can work on those and you can improve. That was kind of my weakness, was, you know, I just— I had a tendency to speed up and to rush everything and to want to, you know, turn everything into, you know, some kind of blazing barn burner of a tune. But you know, for, for you, you know, I know other people have a tendency to kind of play behind the beat. Maybe they have a tendency to drag or slow down. It doesn't really matter, but practicing along with that tool, with that train beat, where you can really hear it again, it will make your practicing more fun and it will nearly force you to play in time, which if you're doing that consistently, you'll get better and it'll make you want to practice more, which make you get better, which will make you want to practice more, and you can just kind of really, really, really start that upward spiral in your playing. So that's really what I'm here to do today, is to just pay that forward, um, because I know that that's going to help you when you're playing, because I practice along with these kinds of train beats every single day. Um, and you can even take this a step further if you want. Um, I know, uh, Tim Stafford used to talk about practicing along with a drum machine, and he would take like, like, um, like rumba and calypso and reggae beats and stuff like that to deliberately give himself some new rhythmic ideas in his bluegrass solos. Because a lot of times when we're playing bluegrass solos, we're just kind of playing straight 16th notes, you know. But you can practice with other styles like that to give you some new rhythmic ideas. So that's something that you can kind of jump into if you want to. In the meantime though, just take that train beat there, and I will link to some down below the video here. But like I said, I've seen them as slow as 40 beats a minute, and I have seen them as fast as 190 beats a minute. It doesn't matter where you're at, but using this tool in your daily practice routine, I promise you, is going to benefit you in so many ways. I practice along with them every single day. So I know this is a little bit more of a simple lesson here, um, but it really is one of the most important. And again, I wanted to pay that forward and share that with you because, um, it benefited me so much, and I know it's going to benefit you as well. So again, remember, if you'd like to get the tabs for that kind of first little solo that I played at the beginning of the video, hit the link down in the video description and in the top pinned comments, and I will send that to you. And again, I got some different train beats, um, linked in the video description. But ultimately, you're gonna have to do your own research, find the ones that you like that are appropriate for where you're at as a guitar player. And like I said, there's other tools that you can use. There's, you know, certain metronome apps that have this kind of thing. Um, but, you know, ultimately, find what you like, find what works for you. But Start using this, and I know you're going to see tremendous improvements in your playing. As always, thanks for hanging out, and I will see you next time.