Bluegrass Guitar Mastery!-Learn This David Grier Style Version Of "Red Haired Boy"

Hey y'all, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today with a lesson that I am very excited to share with you. So what I've got for you today is what I'm calling a David Greer-inspired version of Red Haired Boy. So, um, basically whenever I was a teenager, it was before the internet. And, uh, back then, in order to, um, you know, to learn what you can learn for free on YouTube, we had to get like instructional, um, like VHS tapes or DVDs. And, um, one of the ones that I, I had, I had ordered for— I don't remember where I ordered it from— was, uh, was David Greer's, um, I think it was called, um, like Building Powerful Solos in Bluegrass Guitar or something along those lines. And, um, it was a great little, uh, it was a great little instructional tape. I mean, he showed you like a whole bunch of really cool stuff on there. And at the beginning of it, he plays, um, he plays Red Haired Boy, and he really puts his own unique kind of David Greer stamp on that. So what I've done is I'm not going to show it to you note for note the way David plays it, because it's basically impossible to play like exactly like David because he has such a unique and cool and idiosyncratic style of playing. But there's a couple of ideas that he plays in that version of Red Haired Boy that I've kind of extrapolated and I've kind of put into my own. So this is kind of a— it's, it's, it's a David Greer-ish version of Red Haired Boy, okay? So it was, um, but, but I definitely took a couple of the ideas that he uses in there, and I think you'll get a ton of value out of that. Um, I've linked down below, I think, like the intro to— there's like bits and pieces of, of the, um, of this original instructional thing on YouTube, so I've linked to it down below here. So yeah, so here is a David Greer-ish version of Red Haired Boy. So I, I, I'm, I'm guessing, um, that most of y'all watching this are already familiar with this tune. I mean, this is a— probably it's one of, if not the most popular fiddle tune for flatpicking guitar. Probably the most popular. I mean, it's kind of the one that almost everybody who plays this style knows. But just if, if not, just real quick, let me give you just a real basic melody version of this tune here. So we'll do the A part, we'll do So that's the A part, which we'll play twice, and then we'll go into the B part, which is Okay, so that's just the basic melody. Okay, so that's just the basic kind of Red Haired Boy melody there. That again, um, it's probably the most popular flatpicking guitar tune. That's, that's debatable, obviously. Um, so let's jump into the kind of David Greer-influenced version of this. So let me give you— let me just kind of go through the A part using a couple of these, um, these ideas that David puts into it. So we'll do, um, Okay, so as you can see there, um, we're still— he's still playing the melody here, but there's just a couple of things that he adds there to give it to give it a little tension, to give it a little twist, to give it a little color. So at the beginning here, instead of just going— he does— okay, which has this ending. Okay, so it deviates from the middle just a little bit there, but— and that's cool. Well, here, let me— let me play that part real quick. So Okay, and what's cool about that is that kind of signals that we're about to go from that G to the C. Okay, and then we'll do And then, okay, so at the end there we're doing a little slide, and then that last lick there, so almost kind of a floating lick. Okay, and so he'll go through and do essentially the same thing, but he adds one other little twist on it. So we'll do right here. Okay, so which gives us the little— just a nice little bit of tension there and some cross picking through that. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

And then we'll go back and do that same phrase. Okay.

So, um, one more time here on the A part of Red Haired Boy played in a David Greer-ish fashion. I think the only change in the performance part of the video on this part I did because the tempo was pretty quick. So you can do that, you can do a strum right there, or you can just cross-pick through. It's actually a really good exercise for cross-picking. Okay, so again, there is— there's a part of Red Haired Boy with a couple of ideas kind of pulled from David Greer. Now let's go to the B part here, and this is where— this is where things get really interesting, okay? So let me just jump to the B part here. I'll play through all of it slow and then we'll analyze a little bit of it. So we'll do Okay, so we've got a lot of repeat phrases from the A part there. But I guess the, the, the big one that we're doing is the, uh, the— that part right there. What we're doing is, uh, and so in the— with the chords on that, when we go to the B part there, we'll do F to C, G, F. And what we're doing there is instead of playing over it. So that melody would normally be played over an F shape. In this case though, our little kind of D minor shape works really nicely over that, and it gives it just a cool little harmonic twist there. So, and that's cross picking through that. So we'll do So that's down, up, down, up, pull-off, up, down, up.

And then so that, that's how we come out of that phrase there. Okay, and then we go back into which we already did in the A part.

And then we'll play that same phrase again. And now Okay, so one more time on our B part here. Okay, so you can see there, I mean, he puts his really own unique stamp on there. He gives it some, you know, some kind of unexpected kind of harmonic things, you know, where he— that kind of thing. And then he throws in a lot of cross-picking again to give it that kind of classic David Greer stamp on there. So let me go through the whole thing one more time here. I'll do it slow and we'll do B part. Okay, so, um, oh, I gotta show you the, the little outro lick that I played at the beginning here. So that's gonna go like this. We'll do All right, okay, so this first little lick, he actually plays that in a tune called Smith Chapel. Um, he plays it really fast, something like that. Whoops. And then, and then that last one, that little— I kind of took that from the solo he plays to Molly and Tin Brooks, which I did a lesson video breakdown. You can check that out here.

So that's a So one more time.

All right, so let's hear that whole thing up to tempo with the backing track again. Okay, so there you have it. There's a, there's a kind of Red Haired Boy in the style of, just taking a couple of ideas from David Greer. And again, hit the link down below the video. I've got it linked to, to the, to the original instructional series where he plays that at the very beginning. Again, I'm not doing it exactly note for note like he does, but I'm taking a couple of the ideas that he does and kind of putting together here for you for a kind of a David Greer-ish version of Red Haired Boy. And as always, you can hit the link in the video description or the top pinned comment to get the tabs for this lesson for free. And as always, thanks for hanging out, and I will see you next time.