Aaron Jaxon breaks down a bluegrass flatpicking lead into three chunks, covering left-hand position shifts, slides, and right-hand alternate picking. He references Tony Rice, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, and Bryan Sutton, and recommends practicing continuous 16th notes slowly before building speed.
Hey friend, and welcome to a little lesson here on, you know, how to cover the guitar neck playing some like really authentic sounding bluegrass lead ideas. It's stuff that you might hear players like Billy Strings or Molly Tuttle or Tony Rice or Brian Sutton playing here. What I'm going to show you is I'm going to show you how to play that entire extended run that I played at the beginning of the video, but I'm going to chop it down into 3 smaller and more easily digestible sections. And then at the end, we're going to combine all those together and you'll have this really monster run that again starts from down here on the open strings, comes up to the 12th fret, and goes all the way back down there. So yeah, super excited to share this with you here. Hey, if you are kind of new to this style and you'd like sort of like a crash course for this stuff, I've got a free 45-minute bluegrass flatpicking video lesson that I want to send you. Just hit the link in the description to this video here and you're gonna get a free 45-minute video lesson crash course. And you're also gonna get downloadable and printable tabs in PDF form for the whole thing, and that's yours to hang on to and keep as long as you want. And if you learn the material in that, you really lay a solid foundation for, uh, you know, developing some really killer bluegrass lead chops. All right, so let's jump into the lesson. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. Instead of me going through and showing you that whole run that I played at the beginning of the video, I want to start with a couple of smaller chunks.
So here's the first one we're going to do.
Okay, let me play that one again.
We're gonna do—
okay, so if you've listened to this style at all, that first, that first little run is a very familiar sounding kind of Tony Rice passage. You know, he plays that. Billy Strings kind of has a variation on that where he does that. All right, but again, so at the beginning. Now this is where our position shift comes in because we're gonna play these 3 notes— that's the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th frets— but hit the 2nd fret with your pointer finger and then the 3rd and the 4th frets both with your middle finger. Okay, so, so far we've got— and then that puts our left hand in the position to where we can play the rest of this lick comfortably.
So, and then we'll do—
okay, so one more time on this first, uh, little chunk of this run. Okay, so start there. That's just— I think that's just like a little 2-bar phrase. And play it as slow as you need to there. One other thing that I wanted to mention before we go on here: play it as slow as you need to. I don't care if you need to get this sucker down to 30 or 35 beats a minute, that's okay. But what you do want is you want these to be a continuous flow of 16th notes. You don't want unnecessary pauses in there. Like, you don't want it to sound like You get the idea. Okay, so that's the first chunk there. Let's go into the next one, and it's gonna go like this.
We're gonna do—
all right, so that's a fun one. So let's start at the beginning here. We're gonna do Okay, so at the beginning here we'll do— and then we want to do that slide from 5 to 7. And then now right here, this is where our position shift comes into play, because we're going to come back up and hit that 6th and 7th fret again.
But we're going to do—
hit that with your middle finger, because again, that puts our left hand in the position to play the rest of that lick. And then right here, 7th fret of the 3rd string, we're going to hit that, slide to 5, 3, 4 on the 3rd, 5th fret on the 4th. So again, we've got Okay, so that's the second chunk out of this run here. Let's do, um, let's jump into— oh, one other thing that I did want to mention here as far as the, the right hand, the picking hand. Now this, the, the picking hand gets a lot of attention in this style of guitar playing, and rightfully so, because it requires more out of your picking hand than, I mean, just about any other I mean, maybe certain forms of metal and maybe like gypsy jazz requires as much out of your picking hand. But anyway, just with this, use alternate picking as your guide on this. There's a few places in some of these where I'm throwing like 2 upstrokes or 2 downstrokes in a row, but for the most part, I'm just using alternate picking through this. So just keep that in mind. All right, so let's jump into the third chunk of this position shifting run, and it's gonna go like this. We're gonna do Okay, so let's try that again here.
We'll do—
so that's where our position shift comes in with the ring finger. And then right here, we're going to slide from 10 up to 12. All right, and then pointer finger slide from 10 to 8, and then 8 to 6, and then we'll end it. So again, one more time on that third chunk here, we're going to do Okay, so before we combine all these together, let's go through these 3 again here. So here's the first one, position shift. Okay, here's the third one— I'm sorry, the second one. And here's the third one. Okay, so let's, let's connect the whole thing now. We're going to combine all three of those together, and then I'm going to add in a few notes at the end to just kind of round out the phrase. All right, so go like this.
We'll do—
all right, so at the beginning, it's just— that's That's that first little, um, passage that we played. And then we jump.
Now we're into the second one. Now we're into the third one.
Now kind of back to the second one. Okay, so again Okay, I may have threw a couple of extra notes in at the end right there, but, um, so again, a big thing with this one here, don't let the speed I was playing it at at the beginning of the video— yeah, don't worry about about getting it that fast right now. The, the most important thing on this is to get those little position shifts again, that way you can comfortably move up and down the guitar neck when you're playing bluegrass lead ideas. But really, the important thing is get all of those, um, as a continuous stream of 16th notes. You don't want unnecessary pauses in that. So that's the kind of the big thing to remember there. But, um, all right, cool. Okay, thank you so much for hanging out today. I've got a lot more of these videos that I'm gonna send your way. But hey, again, if you'd like a free little 45-minute crash course on this, complete with, you know, printable and downloadable tabs, hit the link down in the description. Put your name and email in there, that way I'll know where to send it. And yeah, jump into that, and I will see you in the next video. All right.
