Discover Albert Lee's Game-Changing Country Guitar Ideas

Hey there and welcome back to the channel. So I've got a really cool lesson that I want to share with you here today, and, um, these ideas These are some of my favorite chicken picking ideas here, and, um, I really think Albert Lee is the player that's really kind of, um, most well-known and most associated with these kinds of ideas. He uses them a lot, and they're, they're fun to play, and they're also really, um, usable. And so what I want to show you today is how to play some of these ideas going through a G, C, and a D chord progression, which is a chord progression we'll use a lot in, you know, playing country music. So, um, as always, if you would like a free 30-minute little country chicken picking guitar crash course, hit the link down in my bio to grab that. I've jammed about as much valuable information into a half-hour video lesson as I can, and I know you're going to get a ton of value out of it. You'll get free downloadable printable tabs in PDF form with that So hit the link in the video description to grab that, and let's jump into the lesson here. All right, so you heard me play it at the beginning of the video, but I want to go ahead and do it again here for you. So the ideas are going to go like this. Okay, so here, here's the basic idea here. So this first shape here, this is like a little G major triad on the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd strings. I'm doing the 5th fret of the 4th string, the 4th fret of the 3rd string, and the 3rd fret of the 2nd string. Okay, and then what we'll be doing for these ideas— have your pick hit the 4th string and then have your middle and ring fingers hit the 3rd and 2nd strings respectively. All right, so there we go. That's pretty easy to remember. Now here's what we want to do. Um, so we're going to hit the 4th string. Now have your middle and ring finger pick the 3rd and 2nd strings, and then we're gonna pull off from that, um, 4th— that 4th fret of the 3rd string to the open 3rd string.

So we're going to do—

so pick the 4th string and then have your middle and ring finger hit the 3rd and 2nd strings, and then pull off from that 4th fret of the 3rd string to the open. And then after that, so So I guess we'll do that 3 times, and after we do it 3 times, uh, we'll hit this 5th fret of the 4th string again and then hit the 3rd and 2nd strings fretted on the 4th and 3rd frets. A lot of numbers here, y'all. A lot of numbers. Okay, so the pattern again goes like this. We'll do Okay, so that's the basic pattern that we're going to be using through this entire sequence here. So, um, just a couple of things. I think the way Albert Lee actually plays these, he actually, instead of doing a pull-off, I think he, he picks that. He like does an up pick on it. As you can hear, I suck at doing that. I have tried to develop that over the years. It just hasn't worked out for me. So you're welcome to experiment with that because it gives, it gives it this really cool staccato sound. You know, you can, you can experiment with that. Um, but it's also, it's easier to play and it also works really well, uh, just doing a pull-off right there. But you do want to make sure that that pull-off is like as loud as a picked note would be in order for these ideas to have the effect that they need to have. So again, we've got— and we're gonna do that twice.

So we're gonna do—

so a couple of other things to, um, to, um, hit on here, uh, which is if you watch my left hand right there, I'm actually— I'm deliberately lifting up my ring finger when I come over here instead of doing that.

You hear the difference?

And the thing about it is, when it comes to chicken picking guitar, a lot of the time we're going for a deliberate staccato sound. You hear that? We're deliberately going for a, for a deliberate staccato sound in this style. So over here, I'm gonna pull up my ring finger when I go to this shape here because it just gives it a little bit more of that. And that's not going to have the same effect if I'm doing— okay, so anyway, that's the basic idea here. Now, so that's over G. Now let's go to C. And here's what we're going to do for C. The shape we're going to do on C is this. Pinky finger on the 8th fret of the 4th string, um, and then pointer finger on the 5th fret of the 3rd and 2nd strings. Okay, so on this here, I, I'm hitting, but when I do the pull-off, I'm only pulling off from the 3rd string. And same deal, you can see how I'm lifting my pinky finger up as I come and hit this double stop. That way we're not doing That actually doesn't sound bad, but I'd still get in the habit of, again, to give it that deliberate chicken picking staccato sound that we're going for. So, and then after that, we'll go to D, and we're going to do D down here as like a little D7. Okay, and we're gonna do— okay, so as far as the technique, everything's the same. Picks is hitting the 4th string. Middle finger and ring finger are hitting the 3rd and 2nd strings. And then over here, uh, pinky finger's on the 4th fret of the 4th, middle finger on the 2nd fret of the 3rd, pointer finger on the 1st fret of the 2nd string. And then we'll go back to G after that. So let me play the whole thing here. We'll do 1, 2, 3, 4. Yeah, I love these ideas. They're so much fun to play and they just have such a cool sound, and you can move them around and use them in a lot of different places. Um, and we'll— I'll talk about more about that here in just a little bit. But let's go through and let's do another way of going through G, C, and D with all of these. Okay, so now instead of doing G down here, we're gonna do it up here, which— this is the shape we were using for D down here. Now we're going to move it up Uh, pinky's on the 9th fret of the 4th string, middle finger's on the 7th fret of the 3rd string, and pointer finger's on the 6th fret of the 2nd string. But, and again, our technique's going to be the same though, right? Now for C, we'll do what we did for G down here. We'll just move it up, um, we'll move it up here instead of doing it on the 5th, 4th, and 3rd third frets. Excuse me, we'll do it on the 10th, 9th, and 8th frets up here. And then for D, we'll do what we did for C, um, the, the first time through this.

We'll do— and then we'll go back to G. Yeah.

Okay, so, uh, again, we'll do Okay, so now let's hear how all of those ideas sound with, um, with a, with a little backing track. I'm just going to play it with a drum track. I'm going to play it with the train beat at 80 beats a minute, which is a pretty moderate tempo, and you can hear how those, um, ideas sound in time. Okay, so I recommend practicing those along with that train beat, along with that backing track there. But there's just a ton of places you can use these ideas, and I'm going to be doing more videos on these because, you know, obviously we're not limited to G, C, and D. We can do it in E, A, we can do it in F, uh, B, you know, and there's a bunch of little variations on this. So I'll be doing more videos on this, but in the meantime, kind of start working on those. And, um, I, like I said, I just love these because, um, you're getting some good hybrid picking technique, um, but you've also just got some really cool, really usable country chicken picking double stop pull-off ideas, um, that are actually— that are not super hard to execute, um, because once you kind of get the basic pattern down, they're fairly easy to move around. And like I said, you can use these in a lot of different songs. So as always, thanks for hanging out. Remember to hit the link down in the video description to grab that free little 30-minute crash course little video lesson down there with printable and downloadable tabs in PDF form that are yours to keep. As always, thanks for hanging out, and I will see you next time.