Bluegrass Lead Lines Masterclass!-Position Shifting Runs In G, C and D

Hey there, it is Aaron Jaxon coming to you today, and what I've got for you is a longer lesson where I have combined my previous 3 YouTube lessons around these ideas that I'm calling bluegrass position shifting runs. What these ideas are going to do is help you move all over the guitar neck in a really cool sounding bluegrass flatpicking lead style. Now, I originally came up with these ideas because a lot of times students of bluegrass lead guitar kind of get stuck on these like bottom 3 and 4 frets, and what these ideas are are going to help you do is to break out of that area of the guitar, move all over the guitar neck again in a really authentic sounding bluegrass lead style. This lesson is going to give you a ton of new ideas that you can use in your own bluegrass leads and solos, and I know you're going to love what I've got for you today. So as is always the case, you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. All right, enjoy! Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today. So what I've got for you today are a couple of bluegrass position shifting runs. Now I have shared ideas similar to this on this channel before, but it's been a hot minute and I wanted to revisit the topic for a couple of reasons. Number one, In bluegrass, our picking hand gets most of the attention because this style requires more out of our picking hand than just about any other style of guitar playing does. However, the left hand is just as important, and what these runs are going to show you how to do is to how to move up and down the fretboard in an economical manner. And we want to do that for a couple of reasons. Number one, when we're playing bluegrass lead, a lot of times we get stuck down here in these kind of first 3 to 4 frets, you know, when we're playing these ideas like You know, or love all of that really classic Tony Rice sounding stuff, but sometimes we get a little stuck down here. So these runs are going to have you going from the open string all the way up to the 12th fret and back down again. So you're not going to be confined to these like bottom, you know, 3 or 4 frets. But also, this is a great primer for going in and learning bluegrass solos. I started developing these bluegrass position shifting runs a couple of years ago when I would get students that would come to me wanting to learn bluegrass, and I would immediately have them learning like Tony Rice or Billy Strings or Doc Watson or Brian Sutton solos. And it became clear very early on when I was teaching people that, that a lot of them didn't know how to shift up and down the fretboard in an efficient way to make their leads sound nice. Nice and smooth and clean. So that's what these runs are going to show you how to do today. I'm going to show you 3 of these, and then at the end I'm going to show you how to string all of these together in one monster run that takes you from the open string to the 12th fret and back down again. As is always the case, you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Okay, so position shifting run number 1, so that's going to go like this. We're going to do All right, let's try that again. Okay, so the beginning of that lick should sound pretty familiar. You know, that's kind of Tony Rice, Red Haired Boy. But what we're going to do now, right here, usually index finger, and then middle, middle. And now our left hand is in a position to play the rest of that lick. Okay, so though there's a couple of key places in there where you want to make sure you're using the right finger, so, so index right here, middle, middle, apply these and, you know, put them into tunes that you're jamming on or tunes that you're working on, all that kind of good stuff. Use your creativity there and, you know, put these ideas into your vocabulary and start to use that in the music that you're playing. So again, check out the tabs down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Check out some of these other videos right here for a little bit of a deeper dive on some of this kind of bluegrass lead stuff. As always, thank you for hanging out, and I will see you next time. Today I'm going to show you some bluegrass position shifting runs out of D that are going to get you moving all over the neck, burning it up, and shredding licks like a bluegrass guitar god. All right, now you better stick around. Hello there, it is Aaron Jaxon coming to you today, and I want to welcome you to a kind of part 3, if you will, on some of these bluegrass position shifting runs. Now I've already done 2 of these that I uploaded these past couple of weeks. You can check those out here, and I'll link to them down in the video description. But what I'm showing you in these lessons are how to play some of what I call bluegrass position shifting runs. It's just really cool and authentic sounding bluegrass bluegrass lead lines that get your left and right hand working together and get you moving up and down the fretboard. I started developing these for my students because people would come to me wanting to learn bluegrass, so I'd jump right in, be like, all right, well, let's learn Tony Rice's Nine Pound Hammer, or let's learn, you know, Billy Strings' Dust in a Baggie, or let's learn, you know, Doc Watson's Black Mountain Rag. And I would notice that they would have a lot of trouble being able to kind of shift up and down the fretboard in a smooth and efficient way to make their leads sound smooth, clean, and solid. So I started developing these position shifting runs for my students, and they started having a whole lot of success here. So what I'm going to show you today are 3 bluegrass position shifting runs in the key of D, and then I'm going to show you one kind of big monster run at the end that combines all of those together and will get you moving from the open string up to the 10th fret and then back down again. So as always, you get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Also in the video description, you'll find a link to all of my current online courses. If you'd like to go a whole lot deeper and get access to the very best content that I have around this style of guitar playing, check that out down in the video description. And I've also got a link to my virtual tip jar if you'd like to just throw in a little love and help support the channel. Also, as I started shooting this lesson, the battery in the smoke alarm in my studio started going off. So if you hear this— that right there, that— if you hear that beep throughout the lesson, that's all it is. Don't think that you're having auditory hallucinations or going crazy or anything like that. Just the battery in my smoke alarm is dying, and I didn't want to get up right in the middle of the lesson, go change that, and start the whole thing over again. So again, if you hear this random beep That's all it is. You're not going crazy, I promise you. Okay, so let's go ahead and jump into this first D position shifting run here, and it's going to go like this. Okay, one more time here, we'll do Okay, so this lick is fairly straightforward here. The position shift is not too extreme on this, but I like this one a lot because it does shift, and it's kind of like a 2-octave D run, if you will. So when I say the D run, it's, you know, similar to the G and the C run, we're doing— which, if you want to go into scale talk, is kind of like major blues scale. And you can do that in a lot of different places on the guitar neck. You can do it up here, down here. But what we're going to do with this run is we're going to kind of— we're going to start off down here, and then we're going to Okay, and that's kind of out of our third and fourth pentatonic, our third and fourth kind of major blues scale pentatonic patterns. And, uh, okay, so we're doing Okay, so there we go. That's kind of our first D position shifting run here. So what I want to do here is I want to play that with a backing track, and I want to play it up to tempo here for you. This is— it's pretty quick, it's at about 130 beats per minute, but I want to play it for you just to give it a little bit of context here.

All right.

And by the way, whenever you hear me talking about, you know, pentatonic pattern 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, if you don't have a good grip on that stuff, down in the video description I've got a link to my Guitar Scales Fundamentals mini-course. It's, it's, it's 2 or 3 hours worth of content. It's not a whole lot of stuff, but I do get right down to the brass tacks of learning your pentatonic and diatonic scales, how to link all the patterns together, and how to play those in any major or minor key. This is one of the things that I see that a lot of lead guitar players just do not have a good grip on. And if you'd like to really master that, check that out down in the video description. Okay, so there is our first kind of D position shifting run here. Let's go into our next one, and it's gonna go like this. We're gonna do Okay, one more time. Okay, so you'll be able to see here, this starts off almost, um, identical to the first one that we did, but right here, okay, even though those are the same notes that we played, um, on the other one because we did with this one, this is very, very important on this one.

We want to do—

so instead of using our middle and ring finger, use your middle and then index right there. That's important because that's where we need to position shift in this run. And then from there, okay, so again, if, if we want to go into scale talk for just a little bit. Down here, that's kind of our third position major blues scale, and then we jump up into like our fourth position pentatonic blues scale. And then right here, we're going to kind of slide up into like that pattern 5, throw in that little chromaticism again. That's giving us the— that's the difference in like our blues scale and our pentatonic. And then we're going to shift back down to pattern 4, again, kind of major pentatonic blues scale. But now on this shift, now we're down into like the minor pentatonic. And then, okay, so like pattern 4, pattern 5, pattern 4. Down to the minor pentatonic. Okay, so one more time on this second D position shifting grind.

Okay.

So now let's kind of do what we did with the other lick here. I want to play this one up to tempo and with a backing track just to give you a little context of how this would sound in like a bluegrass tune. Let's go into our third bluegrass position shifting run in D. It's gonna go like this. Okay, so with this one, we're starting up here And you can think of this like, um, you know, 5th pattern, um, major blues scale, if you will. You can also think of that kind of out of your little root inversion triad. And then with your pinky finger, let's come over here to the 7th fret. We want to slide from 7 up to 10 because now we're in the position to where we can— we can kind of be in this position to where we can play the rest of this passage. Okay, and what we're doing there is, you know, you can think of that like your kind of major pentatonic. You can also kind of think of it like D mixolydian, our kind of dominant 7 scale. Okay, but again, so far we've got— and now from here we're going to slide up. Okay, so, um, and what we're doing there is we're kind of sliding up into our second major blues scale pattern, back down to pattern 1, and then we're going into our minor pentatonic. And right there we're doing a little slide from— it's like the 8th fret to the 9th fret on the 5th string, and then hitting the 4th string open. Okay, pretty cool. So that, that little pass, okay. And then we'll end that, um, you know, with our, with our D run. So one more time, third bluegrass position shifting run here. We'll do Okay, so as I did with the other ones here, let's hear that lick played along with a backing track up to tempo to give it some context. One more here. We're gonna do the monster run. We're gonna combine all of these together in one run that takes you from the open string up to the 10th fret and back down again. That's gonna go like this. Okay, so we're starting off essentially with, uh, the second lick that we did, which contains the first lick. And then now we're jumping into the third one that we did. I'm ending that just a little bit differently than I did with the third lick. We're doing Okay, but anyway, one more time, um, the monster run here, all of these position shifting licks combined. There we go. Okay, so as I did with the other licks here, let me play that along with a backing track up to tempo. This is at about 130 beats per minute. Okay, so there you have it here. And again, you can play these as slow as you need to. You don't have to play them all at, you know, 130 beats a minute. If you need to, you know, practice them, practice them as slow as you need to. But the point here is, is you want to get these nice and you want to get them smooth and clean. And I've said this many times on this channel before, but I want to say it again. Remember, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. And what that means is that whenever you're learning this stuff, get them slow and concentrate on getting them smooth, clean, and in time first. And once you've got that set as your foundation, it's a whole lot easier to build speed from there. So, all right, I want to thank you so much for hanging out today. Check out these other two videos right here where I essentially show you what I showed you in this video, but I show it to you in G and C. And then when you combine all three of those together, you've just got endless amount of these bluegrass runs that'll move you all over the neck. Add this to your vocabulary and you can use this in your playing. You'll never run out of ideas to pull from when you're coming up with your own leads and your own solos. As always, thank you for hanging out, and I will see you next time.