Aaron Jaxon teaches five fiddle tunes for bluegrass guitarists building foundational skills. Each tune is played at 80 BPM and half speed with tabs on screen, focusing on alternate picking, hammer-ons, and timing rather than speed or improvisation.
If you're fairly new to bluegrass flatpicking, or even if you've been playing for a while but you're still working on getting your foundation set, today's lesson is going to be for you because today I'm going to be showing you 5 simple fiddle tunes that I think every bluegrass picker should know. Learning these isn't just about adding 5 new tunes to your repertoire. These are the kind of tunes that are going to give you the chance to take all of that foundational stuff that you've been working on, like technique, alternate picking technique, alternate picking with hammer-ons and pull-offs, timing, all of that good stuff, and apply it to actual music. Plus, a while back I shared this lesson right here, and it's become one of the most popular lessons on this channel. And all it is is just 5 simple bluegrass solos to 5 classic bluegrass tunes. So today's lesson is the perfect companion lesson to that one. You'll have 5 simple solos to classic bluegrass vocal tunes, and you'll have 5 simple fiddle tunes. If you're in this stage where you're working on setting your foundations, your foundation of technique and timing and applying it to actual music, I hope that this lesson combined with the other one is just going to help take the pressure off of you. You do not need to be chasing a million different techniques and a bunch of fancy advanced speed building ideas and improvisation and improvising over fiddle tunes and learning every scale pattern in every key. You don't need to be doing that. You just need to be working on your foundational technique and timing and applying them to 10 simple tunes. So learn all of these tunes Get them clean, get them with the right pick strokes, play them in time, and get them memorized, and you are going to have an amazing foundation for which you can build from as you move forward in this style. So the way this lesson is going to go is going to be very simple. I'm not going to play these tunes fast. I'm going to play each one of these tunes at 80 beats per minute, and then I'm going to play each one of them at half speed. And on the half-speed playthrough, you'll see scrolling tabs that'll go across the screen so you'll know exactly what to play. And yes, You can get the tabs down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. So the tunes that you're going to learn today are simple, but the foundations that you're going to set through learning, memorizing, and playing these are going to serve you so well going forward in this style. All right, let's go into the first tune.
