Blues Scales For Bluegrass Guitar (pt.2 of 3)

Today I'm going to be showing you the scale patterns that your favorite bluegrass players use to come up with their amazing solos and lead lines. All right, stick around. Hey there, it is Aaron Jaxon coming to you today, and I want to welcome you to a kind of part 2 on a 3-part series that I'm doing around scale patterns that bluegrass players need to know. So I'll get right to it here. The scale patterns that I really recommend that bluegrass players learn are blues scale patterns up and down the neck. So many of the great lead lines and solos that we love from our favorite players like Tony Rice and Doc Watson and Norman Blake and Billy Strings are based around these blues scales. So in part 1 of this series, which you can check out here and I will also link to down in the video description, I went through and I showed you exactly how to play the 5 blues scale scale patterns. I showed them to you in G major and in G minor. So if you haven't had a chance to watch that video, or if you're not familiar specifically with your blues scale patterns up and down the neck, make sure you go and watch that video and really get these patterns underneath your fingers before proceeding with this lesson. So what I'm going to be showing you today is how to take some of these blues scale patterns and instead of just staying in the key of G, I'm going to show you how to move these through a real simple 1, 4, and 5 chord progression. And today we're just going to use G, C, and D because this is the most common chord progression that we use in traditional bluegrass music. As is always the case with my lessons, you can get the tabs for this down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. All right, so let's jump into it here. Okay, so to get started with, all I want to do is I want to take this first major blues scale pattern, which in G will be— okay, all I want us to do is I want us to take that and move that through C and D. Okay, so we've just played it in G. Okay, so now I want us to take the same scale pattern and let's, and let's move it up to C here. So what I want to do with this exact same pattern, this starts on our root note in G. Okay, so we need to find our root note on the 6th string, and for this next example it's going to be C. C is going to be up here, and I'm going to switch to my pinky finger. That way my hand can cover this kind of, you know, you might call it 5th position, but, um, we're just going to go through that exact same scale pattern here. Okay, and then I just want us to move that up, um, now to the 10th fret to hit our root note of D on the, um, 10th fret of the 6th string and do that same pattern. Okay, and then let's come back down to G after that. Okay, so one more time through G, C, and D. We'll start with G, and then let's come up to the 8th fret with our pinky finger.

Do it, do it in C.

Let's move that up to the 10th fret here, same pattern, and then back down to G after that. Okay, so there we have it. Pretty simple and pretty straightforward. They're just that first major blues scale pattern. We want to learn it in G, but then we want to move it through C, and we want to move it up to D as well. We want to get familiar with playing lead ideas through chord changes because we do this all the time in bluegrass, especially around, you know, quote-unquote, you know, vocal tunes, because a big part of the bluegrass repertoire is instrumentals. But on vocal tunes especially, you know, which most of them use pretty simple 1-4-5 chord progressions, but when you're playing those, we really do target the chord tones and target the chord changes in our lead solos very similar to the way a jazz player would do it. So that idea is a great way to get started with this. Now, we don't want to just learn those scale patterns to get familiar with them. There's a couple of other things we want to practice. We want to practice our technique. And, um, if you haven't had the chance to, you can reference this, uh, this kind of masterclass that I shared here around foundational bluegrass lead techniques. But, um, you know, you just want to make sure that you're getting a good sound out of your pick here. We don't want a really harsh staccato sound, you know, but we also don't want too kind of flimsy of a sound, like way up here in the sound hole, like We don't want that either. I like my pick kind of right where the sound hole starts. That way it's got a little bit of bite to it, but it's also got a smoothness to it. Okay, so we want to be doing that, and you want to be working on your timing as well. So we want to be working on good technique, making sure we're getting a good tone out of the instrument. Watch your left hand fingers. And again, I've talked about fretting hand fundamentals on this channel here, Make sure that your left hand fingers are kind of hitting the sweet spot of the fret. They're hitting the bottom of these frets. And as you're going through and playing those, make sure you're avoiding like the, the balloon man fingers. You know, you want to avoid all of that wasted motion there. So just nice, smooth, clean technique, making sure everything sounds nice and smooth. And you also want to be practicing your timing with this. So just real quick, I wanna take this example that I just showed you, just that first blues scale pattern through G, C, and D, and I'm gonna play that along with a Strum Machine backing track. I'm gonna play this at about 100 beats per minute, and that'll sound like this. And I will include the backing track in the email that you'll get with the tabs for this. So that's a great way to get started, you know, taking some of these scale patterns but playing them through a common chord progression that we use in traditional bluegrass here. But now I want to take it a step further here, and what I want us to do is instead of just playing pattern 1, I want to mix up the patterns, okay? And what we're going to do is this, we're going to do Okay, and then now we'll go to C and we'll go here. And then for D, we'll come up here. Then when we go back to G, we'll come up here. Okay, okay, so here's what we're doing here. So we're starting off with this like G major blues scale pattern 1. Which we've already done. But then from there, I'm going to this like C major blues scale pattern 4. And again, when I'm saying, you know, pattern 1 and pattern 4 and those kinds of things, if you're like, Aaron, I don't know what you're talking about, again, reference the first video that I did in this series. I do a deep dive and show you all of those patterns and give you the numbers for that, all that good stuff. Make sure that you watch that one. But then after that, we're gonna come up here to this like D major blues scale pattern 4. Okay, and then after that, we're gonna come up to our like G major blues scale pattern 3. Okay, so what we're doing here is instead of just taking that first pattern and moving that around the neck, we can kind of stay in the same general area for a little bit while mixing up these patterns here, which is really cool. And another good thing to kind of point out here, so, you know, on this first pattern— and I've talked about this many times on the channel, but I mean, so many classic bluegrass lines straight out of that, like Tony Rice, Billy Strings' Dust in a Baggie, you know. I mean, just so much great stuff out of that. But this like C major blues scale pattern 4 down here, and you can also think of that kind of based around your C major arpeggio. But I mean, how many great Tony Rice straight out of that?

Even—

I mean, just a bunch of really classic bluegrass lines right out of that. Okay, and then up here for D, again I'm using that kind of 4th blues scale pattern for D. And I mean, you know, you know, kind of going back to Tony Rice, but like, you know, or again, just a bunch of classic stuff again right out of that Okay, learning these scale patterns, it's like mapping out the territory. It's kind of knowing what neighborhood that a lot of these ideas come from. And then this third one up here, um, you know, okay, you know, Tony Rice would use, you know, like ideas like that all the time, you know. And even over on the higher part of the scale pattern, a lot of ideas ideas will come out of that as well. Showing you how these scale patterns will really help you map out the territory, map out the neighborhood where a lot of these really great and classic bluegrass lead ideas come from. So one more time, let me go through this example here. So we'll start off with G major pattern 1 to C major pattern 4. D major scale pattern 4. G major blues scale pattern 3.

Okay.

So really cool stuff here, but again, we're mixing those patterns up there. So now one more time here, because you always want to be practicing your technique and your timing and trying to make this stuff sound like music. So I want to play that along with a Strum Machine backing track here. Again, this is at about 100 beats per minute. It'll sound like this. Okay, so I wanted to end with just a couple of big picture ideas here. So I've said this many times on this channel, I typically don't recommend a scales-based approach to learning bluegrass because bluegrass, it just, it just has such a unique vocabulary about it, and it has this really rich and extensive traditional repertoire that you have to be familiar with. So I really recommend a vocabulary and a repertoire-based approach. However, learning these scale patterns are a great thing to know whenever— however, however, learning these scale patterns, these blues scale patterns, is a really good thing to do in addition to learning the more vocabulary-based stuff that we learn here. When I say vocabulary, I mean phrases, licks, note-for-note solos, tunes, all of that good stuff. Learning these patterns in addition to that other stuff is a great value add to your overall skill set. Again, because you're like mapping out the territory, you're seeing where, you know, Doc Watson and Norman Blake and Tony Rice and Billy Strings and Brian Sutton, like kind of where they're pulling from when they're coming up with these ideas. So when you go through and, you know, you learn a, a Molly Tuttle or a Billy Strings or a David Greer solo here when you're familiar with these scale patterns, you can kind of see where they're pulling from, and it's not just like a complete shot in the dark there. So again, make sure that you check out the first video in this series if you haven't had a chance yet. Remember, you can get the tabs and a backing track for this lesson 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.