Billy Strings' Long Journey Home Solo (Steal These Bluegrass Licks!)

One of the best ways to develop authentic-sounding bluegrass vocabulary is by learning solos from your favorite players. And if that solo is played in a tune that gets called at jams all the time, even better. So today we're gonna do just that. I'm gonna be showing you a solo that Billy Strings plays to the bluegrass jam classic "Long Journey Home," and you're gonna get a bunch of killer licks, phrases, passages, and ideas that you can put to work in your playing immediately. So real quick, this version that I'm gonna teach you today comes from the Me and Dad album that Billy recorded with his father. His dad sings some great tenor harmony on this whole record. The whole record is great, and I'll link down to this version of Long Journey Home that they recorded record down in the video description. The tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. One other thing that I always do like to say whenever I'm teaching these note-for-note solos is I have used my ear to decipher this to the best of my ability. I do try to get as close to what he's doing on the recording as I can, but there may be a couple of places here where maybe it's played with a picked note and I teach it with a hammer-on or vice versa. So I just want to throw that out there. This is— Um, me using my ear to decipher this, but I have tried to the best of my ability to get as close to what he's doing as possible. Now, there's a good chance if you're watching this, you probably already know this tune, but just in case you don't, real quick, I'll play and sing the chorus to this because the verse and the chorus on this song are the same harmonically and melodically. And I'll put the chords up on the screen, and remember that each chord gets 2 beats. That's going to go like this: 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Lost all my money but a $2 bill. A $2 bill, Lord, a $2 bill. Lost all my money but a $2 bill. I'm on my long journey home.

Okay, so that's it. Very simple tune, but again, this gets called at jams all the time. Okay, so let me go ahead and play the full Billy solo for you up to tempo and with a backing track, and that'll sound like this. All right, so what I want to do now is I'm just going to go through, I'm going to play the whole solo nice and slow for you, and then we're going to go through and we're going to kind of dissect it section by section. All right, so let's go through the whole thing nice and slow here. We'll go 1 and 2 and 3 and. All right, so there's so many great little phrases and passages, and I call them Billy-isms in this solo. But one more time, let's just go through the whole thing again here.

So we'll go 1 and 2 and 3. Yeah.

Okay, so let's just kind of break this down into, you know, I kind of think of this in 4 sections here. Um, you know, at the very beginning here, he comes in 1 and 2 and 3, comes in on the and of beat 3. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1.

And then—

And that's just a really tasteful way of playing the melody because the melody goes, you know, lost all my money on a $2 bill. So it's playing the melody without it just being a simplistic melody. Okay, and then he goes into this next little phrase here, which is— Okay, so on this first one, you know, playing it over, uh, G, and that is, you know, mixing mixing minor and major pentatonics and blues scale ideas. Okay, so minor— well, it's minor and major. And then hitting that little F to signal that we're about to go into the IV chord.

And—

All right, so one more time here, we'll do— Okay, so remember with this phrase that we just learned, okay, you can use that all the time in bluegrass. Anytime that you have like a 1 bar of G or a 1 chord to like 2 beats of a 4, it happens a lot in bluegrass. Actually, it happens in Little Cabin Home on the Hill.

Tonight I'm alone without you, my dear.

You know, and I'm not saying this phrase would necessarily be appropriate for that, but it would work. Okay, so anytime you have like 1 bar of G to, um, like 2 beats of a C and then back to G, you can use this phrase. Another one, you know, I, I've taught, you know, versions of it on, on this channel, um, the old Stanley Brothers gospel classic, Hallelujah I'm Ready to Go.

Um, in the darkness of night, not a star was in sight.

So, okay, just remember that phrase, because it's usable in a lot of classic bluegrass vocal tunes here. Okay, so, uh, one more time, just kind of from like the first half of this solo here.

So, 1 and 2 and 3 and—

Okay, and then we're gonna jump into this little phrase right here, which is just a lot of fun.

Okay.

Okay, which is just basically like straight chromatic. Skips a couple of notes in there. And then Okay, so again, talking about broader application of vocabulary, this is a great little phrase anytime you have like 2 bars of a G, a G shape, a I chord. If you use that sparingly, it will turn heads at a jam. Again though, you have to use it sparingly. If you use it in every single solo, it will get, you know, it'll get kind of stale. But if you use that sparingly— because the way, you know, the way I experience that as the listener, whenever I'm, you know, like listening to a Billy solo right there, it's like just a little bit of, you know, almost like musical chaos, but then it resolves and we go back into bluegrass territory. So it's like kind of, you know, like the train's about to derail.

Hey!

But then it lands and we go back into classic bluegrass territory. Okay, so again, any place where there's like 2 bars of a G, um, 2 bars of a G shape or a I chord, like How Mountain Girls Can Love, you know, Ride the moonlight in the high cold wind on the trail of the old mountain. 1, 2, 3, 4. That'd be another great place to use that, or anywhere else where there's 2 bars of that chord. Again, happens all the time in bluegrass. So anyway, we're arming you here with some great vocabulary, uh, that you can use in a lot of different places. And then the last phrase on here, I just love it.

Thank you.

Okay, let's do that phrase again.

We'll do—

Okay, so a fantastic little phrase that kind of goes from the open string up to the 7th fret and back down again.

He plays kind of a version of that in, uh, Dust in a Baggy, you know.

Okay, so, um, that's a phrase that he uses a lot, but again, it's just a great phrase to use because it takes you from the open string up to the 7th fret and back down again. And then he kind of— which is always a fun thing. He does that in a lot of different places. He does that in his solo on, um, on Cabin Song. He uses that in a lot of different places there. Um, but you know, let's talk about, you know, broader musical application. Now, um, if you haven't had a chance to check out this video, please do so. And in that, I talk about a turnaround that happens all the time in bluegrass vocal tunes where we go 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. 2 beats of a 1 chord, 1, 2, 2 beats of a 5, 3, 4, and then 1 bar of 1. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, it happens all of the time in bluegrass. And this phrase here, you can use over that turnaround. You would probably, um, want to use that much of it. But there are so, so, so many bluegrass vocal tunes that you could use that phrase over. And again, I just love that because it kind of takes us up here on the neck and then back down.

Okay, one more time.

Let me do kind of the second half of this solo like bars 5 through 8 so we're going to do— Ahh! Okay, so one more time, let's go through the whole solo here, um, nice and slow. Okay, so we're gonna go 1 and 2 and 3. And Okay, so one more time, let's hear that up to tempo and with a backing track. Okay, so there you have it. Here is a fantastic little Billie string solo. Again, that's just chock-full of what I call Billie-isms, classic-sounding Billie phrases. But you can use this in Long Journey Home, which happens all of the time in bluegrass jams. People call this tune all of the time. But we also talked about how you can take each one of those phrases and you can use them in other places in your bluegrass soloing. Again, I really do think that the best way to develop authentic-sounding bluegrass vocabulary is by learning solos from your favorite players. And if we can learn it on a tune like this that gets called in jam sessions all the time, that's even better. But in addition to that, you can take these phrases and you can apply them in so many places in your bluegrass soloing. Remember, I got the tabs for you down in the video description, and in the top pinned comment. So I hope this gives you a great solo to play that's full of great phrases and passages, and you can use this in Long Journey Home, but you can use these phrases in so many other places as well. As always, I want to thank you for hanging out, and I'll see you next time. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE]