3 Bluegrass Licks That Make Your Solos Sound Amazing

If your bluegrass guitar solos are feeling a little stale and a little stiff and you find yourself playing the same licks and phrases every time you sit down to play, well, today I'm gonna give you some ideas to help you break out of that. So what I'm gonna be giving you today are a series of floating licks. Now, all that a floating lick is is a phrase that makes deliberate use of open strings. And when done on a flat-picked acoustic guitar in the context of a bluegrass tune, give your solos a really cool melodic and resonant sound. Here's just a few examples.

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So today I'm gonna be giving you 3 of my very favorite floating licks, and I'm gonna show you how to plug each of those phrases into a classic bluegrass tune. You can get the tabs for these ideas down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. All right, let's jump into the lesson. Okay, so just to illustrate what I'm talking about here, let's take a basic closed position G major scale. I'll play it for you here. I'm sure a lot of y'all probably know this pattern, but I'll go ahead and play it for you. We'll do Okay, so pretty familiar pattern there. Um, you know, a lot of guitar players will be familiar with that. So if we were going to play that scale, um, instead of playing it just all out of a closed position right there, and we were going to play it, uh, you know, using floating licks, it would be like this. We would do Okay, so let me play that again. G major scale as floating licks, and then at the end of it we've got this really cool resonant sound there. So that is— that's the main idea. We've got our closed position scale Or if we wanted to play that as a floating lick— okay, so I wanted to just use that to kind of just illustrate the point here. You can go through and learn that if you want to. As you can see, there's a bunch of big finger stretches and there's like a bunch of cross picking in there. I'd recommend doing it, but it's not a must. But you get the idea right here. Now I could talk about the history of this, like I really think it goes on the guitar It goes back to Chet Atkins. I know Jerry Reed did that a lot. If you listen to Jerry's breakdown, that's basically what Jerry's breakdown is. It's a bunch of floating licks, but he's playing it, you know, they're playing it fingerstyle, but we're playing these ideas with a flat pick, which makes it a lot more challenging. But if you can pull it off and you can get it clean and give it a resonant sound, it really will spice up your leads and just give your flat picking solos a really cool depth to them. Okay, so what I want to do right now here, I don't want to bog you down with like 20 different floating licks. I just want to give you my 3 favorite floating licks and then we're going to take each one of those and we're going to put them into a classic bluegrass tune. So floating lick number 1, and this will be out of G, will go like this. Okay, so let me slow it down here for you. Uh, we'll go really nice and slow here. We'll go 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and Okay, let's do that again here, and I'll count it, I'll count it in again. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and So I forget where I got this one from. I think it comes from Mark O'Connor. I think he plays this somewhere on the Markology album, maybe on the version of Blackberry Blossom he does on that. I don't remember exactly where I got this from, um, but it's just a really lovely little floating lick. And, uh, and again, remember, I mean, we're making deliberate use of open strings. So when you're fretting these ideas, you want to minimize your left hand finger movement. So whenever I get right there, I want that middle and ring finger kind of staying where they're at.

I don't want to play it like—

it just makes it a little less resonant. But, but if you can kind of minimize your left hand finger movement, you get a lot more resonance out of that lick. So just to contrast it here, I want to take that same musical phrase, the exact same notes, but instead of playing it using those open strings, I want to play it, um, just in a closed position. So you can hear the difference. Okay, so if I played that just out of a closed position, it'd sound like this. Okay, we play it again here. Okay, so it's not terrible, but it's boring. It's just kind of a, kind of a major pentatonic scale-based idea there. It just doesn't have the same flavor. But if I play that as a floating lick And it just has this beautiful resonant sound to it. One more time, let me play that lick for you. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and Okay, so we don't want to just stop there here. So now I'm going to put this lick into Blackberry Blossom. I'm going to plug this in to the very end of the A part to Blackberry Blossom, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to play it up to tempo, that way you can hear the context and hear how it sounds, uh, but then I'm going to play it at half speed and we'll put the tabs up on the screen again, that way you can just get the lick and see what I'm doing to put it in context of the tune. So that'll sound like this. Okay, so let's go to the next floating lick here. This one will be out of D, and it's gonna go like this. So just a beautiful little D major floating lick. I got this one from Kenny Smith. He plays it on the Studebaker album. I think the tune is called Snowshoe or Snowshoes. It's just a really pretty D major tune. And he plays it at the very end there.

So nice and slow here for you, we'll go 1, e and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e. Okay, we'll play it again here, we'll go 1, e and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e. Okay.

Just really beautiful resonant sounding phrase. And again, remember, you want to keep your left hand fingers— you don't want to move them around too much because again, that's going to make the phrase sound a little less resonant than it should. And then at the end of it there, you can hear that whole thing ringing out. And you know, like I was saying, it kind of has like a melodic banjo feel. If you've ever played piano and you like step on the sustain pedals, it kind of has that same feel too. Okay, so like I did with the first G lick there, I just want to contrast this. So if I play the exact same phrase but I play it all out of a closed position, it would sound like this. I'll play it again here. So again, not bad, but it's just kind of a boring kind of major pentatonic bass-sounding idea. But when we played as a floating lick, beautiful, tasteful, resonant idea there. So one more time, let me kick it in, or count it in.

1, e and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e. And there we have it.

Okay, so I want to do the same deal as I did with the lick in G. I'm going to plug this one into Whiskey Before Breakfast. We're going to play it out of open D, and, um, like I did with the other lick, I'm going to plug this into the very end of the A part to Whiskey Before Breakfast. I'll play it up to tempo again, that way you can hear the context, but then I'll play it at half speed, and we'll put the tabs up on the screen. That way you can see exactly how I'm plugging this lick into this tune, and that'll sound like this. So we've got one more here. I've got the capo on the second fret, so this lick is technically an A, but it's still out of a G shape. So you can play it, you know, with the capo off and play it out of G. You can move the capo up, you know, play it in B-flat or B, wherever you want to do it at. But the lick will go like this.

We'll do—

okay, so one of my favorites here, and let me do the same thing, let me play it in time and I'll count it in.

We'll go 1, 2, E and 2, E and 3, E and 4, E.

All right, let me do that again.

I'll count us in.

1, E and 2, E and 3, E and 4, E.

Okay.

Beautiful little resonant sounding phrase there. So like I did with the other two licks, I want to play that just out of a closed position again, that way you can hear the difference. So if I played this just out of a closed position, again, same notes, and it ends up being the same musical phrase, but, um, it'll go—

okay, we'll do it again.

Okay, so again, not terrible, but it's just kind of a boring scale-based phrase. But whenever we, you know, make those— that deliberate use of open strings, get this. Okay, so one more time, let me count it in here.

We'll go 1, e and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e. Okay.

So now what I want to do is I want to plug this into a tune. So I'm going to plug this into Gold Rush like I did with the previous two phrases. I'm going to plug that into the very end of the A part. I'll play the whole thing up to tempo, and then I'll play it at half speed, and we'll put the tabs on the screen. That way you can kind of see the specifics of how I'll plug this phrase into that tune, and that'll sound like this. So floating licks are really cool, but they're very challenging to play on a flat-picked acoustic guitar. Um, you know, you could hear Tony Rice use these a little bit here and there, but it was really Um, you know, David Greer started using them a little bit, but it was really, in, in my opinion, it was Tim Stafford and Kenny Smith in the '90s that really came out and really started putting a lot of these into their playing and kind of popularized them as like a standard part of bluegrass lead guitar. You know, check out Tim's stuff with all of the great Blue Highway recordings, just great stuff. You know, Kenny's stuff with the Lonesome River Band, Kenny and Amanda Smith, and his solo albums, especially Studebaker, feature a lot of these kinds of phrases. But I just wanted to give you a handful of these licks to get started with, show you how to plug them into some classic tunes. And if you can take these and get them down and give them a really resonant sound and put them into your playing, it'll really add a cool dimension to your solos. So I got the tabs for these phrases and the guitar profiles for you down below. Feel free to get those. Reference those and use them as much as you need to get these ideas under your fingers. All right, great job. Keep up the great work, and I'll see you on down the road.