Discover The Best Bluegrass Licks You're Not Using
In this instructional YouTube lesson, flatpicker Aaron Jaxon presents three jazz‑ and swing‑inflected bluegrass licks that are rarely used by typical players but can be easily inserted into standard 1‑4‑5 chord progressions. He focuses on the G, C, and D chord shapes (often capoed at the 2nd fret) and demonstrates each lick’s fingering, harmonic function, and musical effect. The first lick moves from a G‑shape to a C‑shape using a thumb‑13th/G13 idea; the second lick returns from a C‑shape to a G‑shape with a half‑step diminished pattern inspired by Danny Gatton; the third lick goes from a D‑shape back to G using a diminished inversion learned from David Greer’s solo on Chris Thiele’s “Clear the Tracks.” Aaron plugs each lick into classic bluegrass tunes—Nine Pound Hammer (G→C lick), Bill Monroe’s “My Rose of Old Kentucky” (C→G lick), and the fiddle tune “Big Sandy River” plus “John Hardy” (D→G lick)—showing how they add tension and a jazzy flavor. He provides tabs in the video description and pinned comment, encourages tasteful, sparing use, and urges viewers to creatively apply the ideas rather than rely on rote memorization.
Chapters
If you're looking for some new bluegrass licks to really spice up your playing, stick around because I'm going to be showing you some ideas that very few flat pickers use but are easy to plug into traditional bluegrass tunes and will make you stand out in a good way at your next jam session. Aaron Jaxon coming to you today, and what I have got for you are some really cool bluegrass licks and phrases that you're probably not using. So these ideas that I'm going to share with you have a very jazz and swing feel to them, but they're very easy to plug into traditional bluegrass tunes. So I'm going to give you 3 different ideas, I'm going to show you how to plug them into 3 classic bluegrass songs, and at the end we're going to plug all of these ideas into a classic bluegrass standard. You can get the tabs for these ideas down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. So these ideas that I'm going to show you here are going to be ideas that you can plug into almost any 1-4-5 chord progression. And with this specific lesson, I'm specifically going to focus on the G shape, C shape, and D shape. A ton of the traditional bluegrass repertoire is played just using these chords. Now sometimes we'll use a capo and put it on the 2nd fret and play the same shapes even though it makes it an A, D, and an E. and we'll do that all over the place. So that's what this lesson is going to focus on today because it is usable and applicable in so many different tunes. All right, so let's jump into this first idea here, and it's going to go like this.
All right, let me play that again.
Okay, so what we're doing there— this is an idea that you can use anytime you're going from a G shape to a C shape, which happens all the freaking time in bluegrass. And so I'll play that again. I want to play it real slow here.
We're gonna do—
so like I was saying at the beginning of the lesson here, I'm not going to bog you down with a whole bunch of jazz theory here because mostly I want to make these ideas as applicable as possible. But this is— this idea, this is if we're ever going from a G shape to a C shape, okay? So you want to come over here Okay, uh, 3rd fret of the 4th string, 2nd fret of the 3rd, open, um, 2nd string. Kind of gives you like a G9. Okay, and then we're going to come up here to this. This, this is like a G13 dominant 7 with the 9 and a raised and a 6th, an octave up, all of that good stuff. But just this shape right here: 3rd fret on the 4th string, 4th fret on the, uh, 3rd string, 5th fret on the second string and then kind of do a bar right here. And you can do— all right, now just take that, take that shape, move it up 4 frets, and then move it up another 4 frets, and then go down a fret. And that leads us into our C, that leads us into our IV chord. Okay, so again And you can slide whenever you go into the— you can slide into that, or just—
okay, so one more time here, we'll do—
okay, so if you throw that into a bluegrass solo, it is going to make you stand out. And again, you can do this anytime you're moving from a G shape to a C shape. So this idea, along with the third idea that I'm going to show you here, I actually picked up from Dave David Greer. There's an amazing solo that he plays on a Chris Thiele tune called Clear the Tracks. And, um, what, what's so cool about the solo that he plays on that— and I'll link to that down in the video description, you should really go and check that out— this tune is a really hard-driving bluegrass mandolin tune. Um, but when David Greer plays his solo, he uses a bunch of these little jazzy and swing ideas, and it just has a really cool effect on there. It's not something that you're expecting but the way he plays these kind of jazz and swing-influenced ideas on this hard-driving bluegrass mandolin tune, I just found that really, really cool. And I wanted to take some of these ideas and plug these into a bunch of classic bluegrass tunes. Now, a variation on this little pattern here is this. We could do— so instead of doing the little— you could just Okay, so it just throws in this really kind of swing, kind of jazz feel into a bluegrass tune anytime you're going from a G shape to a C shape. Because what that does is it adds tension because we're one fret above where our IV chord, where our C would be. So it gives it a little tension and wants to resolve down. Okay, you know, this is something that swing and jazz players know a whole lot about here. I'm not really a jazz expert by any stretch of the imagination, but you can plug these kind of jazzy sounding ideas into bluegrass tunes here. Okay, so again, we've got— or a variation on that is— and that gets us from G to C. So, you know, just like a couple— you know, I wouldn't necessarily use this in Little Cabin Home on the Hill, but if I decided I wanted to, you know, I could do You see how that changes it up and is just like a— it's an ear twister, it's a head turner. It's not something you're gonna hear a whole lot of bluegrass players using, but if you use it sparingly like that, it's really cool and really adds some depth to your playing. But now here's what I want to do. I'm going to use this lick in Nine Pound Hammer, jam session classic. You can go in anywhere, people know this tune. Now I will be playing this with a capo on the 2nd fret, but again, this will just show you how you can go from a G shape to a C shape. We'll do that in 9-pound hammer, and that'll sound like this.
Really cool jazzy idea that can get you from G to C.
You can plug that into classic bluegrass tunes, and that happens all the time in this kind of music. So let's go to our next idea here. And with this one, this is going to help us get from a C shape back to a G shape, okay?
And so the idea that I'm going to use here is going to go like this, okay?
One more time. Okay, and again, that will get us from our C shape, our 4 chord, back to our 1 chord. Okay, but we're doing it in a melodic way there. And so, and that is one of those little bluegrass passages. I've shared it a lot on this channel. It's got a very Doc Watson and kind of Billy Strings. I, it's kind of coming out of that area. Right there. But what we want to do— and then when we get here, so that's normally where we would land right there, that's on the root note. But what we want to do here is go from that root note up a fret, and then here and here. So in this instance, that's 6th fret on the 3rd, uh, 5th fret on the 2nd, 3rd fret on the 1st. And then just move that shape up 4 frets, and then we can kind of resolve back to G after that. So that's what it is. We're kind of out of this little Doc Watson sounding shape, but we want to come up to our 1 and then go up a fret, and then up 4 frets, up 4 frets, up 4 frets. You know, that's kind of that little diminished thing. Where, um, it kind of— the, the sequence of those notes kind of repeats itself in an inverse order every 4 frets, you know. Okay, which again, like the previous example, just gives us a little bit of tension there, and it wants to resolve back to the chord that we want to go to, which in this case we're going from our C shape back to our G shape here. This is an idea that I first heard Danny Gatton use. I think it's from the '88 Elmira Street record. There's like a very bluesy track on there where it's Danny Gatton, you know, he's doing it like, you know, in a really cool way, and he's doing it on a very bluesy tune. But when I heard him doing that, I immediately saw the application for bluegrass too. So now let's use this in a classic bluegrass song here. So I'm going to plug this little diminished lick into Bill Monroe's classic My Rose of Old Kentucky, and that'll sound like this. Okay, so it just adds a little bit of tension there and then resolves back to our I chord, which is a really cool thing. And again, not a whole lot of bluegrass players that use this stuff at jam session. So again, if you'll use this stuff sparingly It'll really make your playing stand out. Okay, one more here, and this one is going to get us from our D shape or our 5 chord back to our 1, and that's going to go like this.
All right, let me play it again here.
Okay, again, this is an idea that I picked up from David Greer and from that solo that he plays to Chris Thiele's tune Clear the Track. He uses it really quick. He does like— in this case, I'm kind of— I'm doing doing some crosspicking around it. So again, just on how to use this here, so we'll start off here with our little D inversion, and then what we want to do is put your pointer finger where your ring finger was, and then this little shape right here, um, uh, pointer finger on the 4th fret of the 4th string, ring finger 5th fret of the 3rd, middle finger, um, 4th fret of the 2nd string. And then we want to— and then move that up 4 frets, and then move that up another 4 frets, and then resolve to our little, um, 1st inversion G triad.
Okay, so again— okay, again, it just adds some tension.
And I think that's kind of a diminished thing there. Again, every 4 frets, it kind of repeats itself. And then we can resolve back to the 1 right there, which is a really cool thing. And again, I picked that up from David Greer's solo to clear the tracks from Chris Thiele. So there's the idea there, okay? And there's just a bunch of different places you could do this. You know, I always love the tune John Hardy for trying out licks in D. You know, I want to see John Hardy getting away.
Y'all seen John Hardy gettin' away.
So, see how it adds some tension there? And it's just kind of unexpected. You don't hear a whole lot of flat pickers at your local jam using licks like this, but they're really cool sounding in these tunes, and it'll really make your playing stand out. So what I want to do here, let's use this in the classic tune, but I'm going to use this in the classic fiddle tune big sandy river, and that's gonna sound like this. Okay, so there's 3 different ideas that you can absolutely use in a ton of different bluegrass tunes. If you're going from G to C, you can do our little thumb 13th idea. If you're wanting to go from C back to G, go up a half step and use a diminished. Or if you're going from D back to G, from 5 back to 1, and use kind of a diminished idea right there. So now let's plug all of those into a classic bluegrass tune. So y'all know I love the tune John Hardy. It's just a great tune. Um, but it's also great for trying out new bluegrass lead ideas here. So you're probably familiar with this tune if you've watched this channel, but just in case you're not, excuse my singing, but I'll sing and play just a verse of that tune here real quick. So, 1, 2, 3.
Well, John Hardy was a desperate little thing, he's out and out with his gun every day. He shot down a man on the West Virginia line, you ought to see John Hardy getting away.
Please excuse my singing. I did not get a whole lot of sleep last night, and I've drank way too much coffee today. But anyway, that's the idea around the tune. That's the basic chords, the basic melody here. So now I'm gonna take all of those little kind of jazzy swing ideas that we learned, I'm gonna plug it into John Hardy, and that'll sound like this. Okay, so there are 3 really cool kind of jazz and swing-influenced ideas that you can start using in your bluegrass solos. Granted, you want to use these tastefully. You don't want to overdo it. But as you've been able to see here, they are infinitely usable across a bunch of traditional bluegrass tunes. And not a lot of flatpickers, not a lot of bluegrass lead players use these kinds of ideas, so they'll really make you stand out in a good way at your next local jam. So I'm not gonna give you the tabs for every single solo that I played in this lesson. I'm just not gonna do that because all that does is it leads to more rote memorization. I will give you the tabs for the basic ideas there, but what I want you to do is just get the ideas down, understand how to use them in the harmonic context of a lot of these tunes here, and then you have to get creative. You have to come up with places in the tunes that you're jamming on or the tunes that you're working on. You have to come up with places where you can use these ideas. Remember, I've said this before on this channel, but I'll say it again: you can't Don't outsource your own creativity. So take these ideas and then get creative with them. But remember, you can get the tabs for the basic ideas in this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. I hope you have a whole lot of fun with these ideas. And remember, down in the video description, check out that Chris Thiele tune Clear the Tracks and listen to the amazing solo that David Greer plays on that. I want to thank you as always for hanging out, and I'll see you next time.
