5 Tony Rice Licks Every Bluegrass Picker Should Know

All right, I got a fun one for you today. I'm gonna be showing you 5 classic Tony Rice style licks, and I'm gonna show you how to use them in your playing and at your next jam session. All right, so let me give you a quick little overview of what we're gonna be diving into today. So I am going to be showing you 5 classic Tony Rice licks, Tony Rice style licks, that I do think every bluegrass picker should know. Now here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna show you a 2-bar version of each phrase And I'm also going to show you a 1-bar version of each phrase. And the reason is, is that if you can get a 2-bar version of each one of these phrases and a 1-bar version of these down, they're nearly infinitely usable in the context of bluegrass music. Again though, I don't want to just give you a couple of cool licks. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to show you how to plug all of the 2-bar versions of these licks into Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and I'm going to show you how to use all of the 1-bar version of these licks in Your Love Is Like a Flower. These are 2 classic tunes. They are jam session favorites, and you can go out and start using these in your playing immediately. So just a few more things here. I promise I'm going to try not to talk too much in this video, um, but a couple of things that I did need to clarify. So number one, you can get the tabs for both the 2-bar and the 1-bar lick of each of these phrases down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. I am not going to give you the complete solo transcription for every version of this that I play inside of Will the Circle Be Unbroken and In Your Love Is Like a Flower. I'm just not going to do that because that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the lesson. Then you just end up trying to learn 10 new solos by rote memorization. That's not what we're trying to do here. I want to give you some classic phrases in the style of the GOAT of bluegrass lead guitar, but when I'm showing you these in the context of Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Your Love Is Like a Flower, it's more of a demonstration. I want to show you that these are applicable inside of standard common jam bluegrass tunes. When I do play them in the context of these 2 tunes, I'm not going to play with like backing tracks and do like pre-recorded or anything like that. I'm just gonna kind of do it on the fly and just demonstrate to you the way I would take some of these phrases and plug them into some tunes. That being said, if you want to experiment with playing these phrases in some other tunes here, I'm gonna put a graphic up on the screen that has a list of some tunes you can use. So this first one here, these are great kind of bluegrass vocal tunes for experimenting with these like 2-bar G-shape licks. And you can essentially put them in the same place that I'm putting them in Will the Circle Be Unbroken. And it's basically on like bars 5 and 6 on the second half of these. So anyway, there's the image there if you need to screenshot that, go and play around with those tunes. But you can use all of these phrases in all of these tunes as well. Now for the 1-bar licks, so in this lesson I'm gonna use Your Love Is Like a Flower just because it's a great bluegrass jam tune. You can use it, you know, you can go to pretty much any jam and people will play it. But if you want to experiment with some other tunes, here is a list of these. Now fun fact about these tunes is these all have the exact same chord progression as Your Love Is Like a Flower. All of them. It's the exact same chord structure, exact same chord progression. Doesn't mean they're the same song, but these little 1-bar licks that we're using, usually on bar 5, will also work in these tunes as well. Okay, so I love this classic little Tony Rouse tuning phrase. If you go back and listen to the Bluegrass Album Band and you listen to a couple of the real famous solos that he did from that, like on Blue Ridge Cabin Home and on Big Spike Hammer. He kicks both of those off with this phrase, or a phrase that's very similar to it. Okay, so for the 2-bar version of this lick— okay, and then if we wanted to shorten that and make it a 1-bar lick So again, the 2-bar version and the 1-bar version. Okay, so if I wanted to plug this 2-bar version into Will the Circle Be Unbroken, um, I'd do it like this. 1, 2, 3. Okay, so Will the Circle Be Unbroken has like a little 2-bar space kind of on the second half of it, specifically on bars 5 and 6, where you can inject a good little 2-bar lick like that. Okay. So it works perfectly, um, right there in Let the Circle Be Unbroken. Now, if I wanted to use the 1-bar, uh, version of that lick, um, I'd put it in Your Love Is Like a Flower. So I would play it like right here. Okay, there's space in that, and your love is like a flower for that little 1-bar version of this lick. All right, let's go into the next phrase. About as classic of a Tony Rice lick as you can get. A lot of times he would use this like at the end of a tune, like at the end of Gold Rush or at the end of Red-Haired Boy, you know, just a great way to end it. But We can also use it inside of tunes instead of just ending tunes. Let's show you the lick here. We're gonna do 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Okay, so that was the 2-bar version. Okay, and then the 1-bar version would just be— okay, so again, the 2-bar version. And then the 1-bar version. Okay, so 2-bar version in Will the Circle Be Unbroken. 1, 2, 3. All right, and then let's do the 1-bar version in Your Love Is Like a Flower. There we go. Okay, so a great little lick that you can use to kind of end a song the way Tony would use it a lot, but you can also plug it into these classic tunes as well. All right, let's go into the next lick. Okay, so kind of similar to the first phrase that I showed you, it's got a very bluesy feel to it. You know, there's a lot of Clarence White in Tony's playing and in a lot of these kinds of really bluesy sounding licks here. But let me just kind of slow it down and give you the 2-bar version and the 1-bar version. So like, 1, e and a, 2, e and a, 3, e and a, 4, e and a. Do that again. And then if we wanted to shorten that and make a 1-bar lick out of it, we'd do 1, E and a 2, E and a 3, E and a 4, E. Okay, again. All right, so like I did with the other phrases, let's plug these into some tunes here. So let's do the 2-bar lick in Will the Circle Be Unbroken. So we'll go 1, 2, 3. All right, and then let's do the 1-bar lick in Your Love Is Like a Flower. Okay, so there we go, another great classic Tony Rice lick here. Let's go into the next lick. So Tony played a lot of different variations, um, on this lick here. So this specific one here, so that comes from Nine Pound Hammer from the Manzanita album. Anyway, that's where that phrase comes from there. But he did a lot of different variations on this. He would also do like, you know. So anyway, you can expand on this a little bit, but I like I like the way it gives it a little, um, a little space and a little breathing room going— Okay, so that is kind of like the 2-bar version of it. All right, and then if you want to make a 1-bar version of this phrase, I like to do Okay, do the 2-bar phrase and the 1-bar phrase. Okay, so same deal as the other ones. Let's plug the 2-bar phrase into Will the Circle Be Unbroken. That'll sound like this. 1, 2, 3. All right, then let's plug the 1-bar phrase into Your Love Is Like a Flower. Okay, so let's go into the next phrase. All right, so Tony used this kind of lick all of the time in so many different places. Um, he uses it at the beginning of Old Train, he uses it in the solo to Age from the Bluegrass Album Band. Um, he, he would use it in Gold Rush. He just used it all of the time. So let's do the 2-bar and the 1-bar version of it. So the 2-bar version. Okay, we'll do that again. And then if we want to shorten that and make a one-bar version of it, we'll do. Okay, that's a very challenging. It's a challenging little phrase, especially with the left hand. Okay. But it's a great sounding little phrase and it's just nearly infinitely usable. So, so let's use the 2-bar phrase in Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and that'll go like this. 1, 2, 3. All right, and then let's use the 1-bar version in Your Love Is Like a Flower. 1, 2, 3. Okay, so there we have it. Okay, so there's 5 classic Tony Rice phrases, and there's the application of those phrases again in Will the Circle Be Unbroken and in Your Love Is Like a Flower. One more time, I want to put this graphic up on the screen. If you want to experiment with using the 2-bar phrases in some other tunes, these all will work. And if you want some other tunes to experiment with the 1-bar phrases, these will all work as well. So again, remember what we're doing here is we're developing vocabulary We're not just learning a couple of standalone Tony Rice licks. We're developing our vocabulary, but we want to be able to use those in music. Remember, you can get the tabs for the 2-bar and the 1-bar licks down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. As always, I want to thank you for hanging out, and I will see you next time.