Fiddle Tune Mastery!- Learn The Classic "Bill Cheatham" For Flatpicking Guitar

All right, today I'm going to show you a flatpicking guitar version of the classic fiddle tune Bill Cheatham. I'm going to show you a basic melody version and a more advanced version, but before I teach it to you, let me play it for you. Okay, so let's go ahead and start with this basic melody version of Bill Cheatham. And by the way, you can get the tabs down in the video description and in the top pinned comment for this. So let's start with just the basic melody version here, and kind of this first phrase that you want to get down is going to go like this.

Um, Okay, so that's kind of the—

that's like the first phrase that you want to get for the A part of this. So again, just by the way, I got the capo on the 2nd fret here. Um, that's important because we're, we're playing this out of like a G shape, but you don't want to go to a jam session with like a fiddle player or a mandolin player and be like, hey, let's play Bill Cheatham in G. It's not gonna— good, you're gonna get kicked out. So anyway, capo on the 2nd fret, play it at an A. Um, but again, just this first little phrase of Bill Cheatham here, we'll do Okay, and then after that, let's go back into this.

We'll do— okay.

Um, so again, kind of the second phrase on the A part. Okay, so, um, that's essentially the A part of Bill Cheatham because we just play that twice. Okay, so let me go through that again. I'll play it real slow for you. So will do. Okay, so that's the A part to Bill Cheatham. We just play that twice.

Just same thing again.

Okay, now at the beginning there the, um, if you want to, you can kind of slide into that to give it a little, just a little, you know, kind of a cool embellishment. You know, you can do the slide or you can kind of leave it out. But that's the basic melody version to the A part of Bill Cheatham there. And, uh, this is just a really fun, you know, kind of lively, happy sounding fiddle tune. Um, and it's also got some great things for your, uh, for your technique here. So that was the A part. Let's jump into the B part here, and let me just play it for you here. We're going to do So just a couple little things to zone in on for the B part of Bill Cheatham here. We'll do, um, okay, so right there, so I'm actually doing that with my pinky. Okay, and then now that right there, when we get to that one, we want to do a position shift there because we're gonna do— okay, so that just kind of puts our hand, our left hand, into position to be able to play the rest of that phrase with, you know, efficient motion, if you will. So again, and then right here Now we'll switch back. Okay, and then we'll do, um, we'll come back over here. We'll shift right here. And then for this last little phrase here, um, there's Different people play this last phrase a little differently, but I'm gonna do— so up here, index finger on this, and then slide right here. Okay, so one more time, be part of Bill Cheatham here. We'll do shift And then, and then we just play that twice, and that is the B part of Bill Cheatham. So on the B part, you know, okay, so yeah, just a really cool, very upbeat, happy-sounding fiddle tune there. So what I've tried to do here with this first version here is just really get as close to like the original fiddle melody as I could. You know, certain players play this a little bit differently, but that's pretty close to like the original fiddle melody there. So I wanted to start with that. Again, fun tune, great for your technique, as most of these fiddle tunes are. One more time, let's just kind of hear how that sounds up to tempo at around 130 beats a So I want to show you just like a little more, like a little bit more of an advanced version here where we'll just kind of play around the melody, add a couple of things in, and shift the melody to a couple of different places. This, this second version is gonna be very David Greer inspired. If you've watched this channel for a while, you know that I'm a huge, huge David Greer fan, and David's just the master of putting a really cool spin on these classic fiddle tunes. So, so let's, let's kind of jump into this more advanced version here. So we're going to start off similar to how we started off before. We'll do— and again, you can slide into that, or you, uh, or you can just— okay. And then we'll do— now right here, let's do— I'm gonna throw in a little cross picking on that. So we'll do And then, okay, so for that one, we're pretty much sticking to what we did on the basic fiddle melody version of this, but I'm throwing in a little extra cross picking on the C chord. So Okay, so then after that, let's jump in again, still on the A part here, but we're going to embellish this just a little bit.

We're going to do—

okay, so, um, that's a really cool little phrase there. So again, we're going to do— all right, pretty Pretty simple right there, but then we're gonna do— so what I'm doing, again speaking relative to the capo here, open, 2nd fret, slide up to the 3rd fret, pick the 3rd string open, pick the 2nd string open. And then now let's slide that middle finger up to— from the 3rd up to the 7th fret. Again, I'm speaking relative to the capo here. So we'll do— so slide from 3 up to 7, 3rd string open, and then 6th fret of the 2nd. Okay, so that little— and what that is, that's just— we're going from a G to a C, and that's just like our— like some dominant 7, some kind of harmony ideas there to signal that we're about to go to that C shape, that 4 chord. Okay, so, all right, and then we're gonna jump into that.

We're gonna—

okay, which is like a C7. Okay, but doing some cross picking on that that. And what I'm doing with my pinky, slide from— I guess that's the 6th fret up to the 8th fret on that 4th string, open 3rd string, 5th fret of the 2nd, and we'll do a little cross picking on that.

We'll do—

okay, so let's take this whole phrase here.

We're going to do Okay, so one more time.

All right, and then we'll go back into our basic melody.

Okay.

So we're still sticking to the melody there, but there's kind of one— there's like two phrases in there where we just kind of fill up a little space. We embellish just a little bit, but we don't deviate too much from the melody there. So one more time, this kind of more advanced version of the A part of Bill Cheatham. Okay, so pretty cool stuff there. Challenging for sure, but I wanted to just show this to you just to give you a couple of ideas to work with here. Now what we're gonna do for the B part is I'm gonna take the melody like down an octave from what we were playing a minute ago. So instead of playing it up there, we're gonna do Okay, so we're coming down to like the 5th, 4th, and 3rd strings, and we'll do All right, and then we'll go back over here and we'll end with this lick. We'll do, which is a really cool, almost, almost kind of like a little floating lick there. Really pretty sounding version of a, of that kind of phrase. Okay, so kind of the first half of this B part on the more advanced version of Bill Cheatham. Okay, so pretty cool there, sticking with the melody, but we're taking it down an octave and we're doing some cross picking around it. Now we're going to take it up an octave, but we're going to again keep doing some cross picking through this. I'm going to do Okay, so, um, we'll do up into this kind of first inversion, um, it's an A major triad, and that's just down, slide down, down on that down. And then we'll go to this like root inversion D, and we'll do— so I'm starting on the second string. We'll do down on the second, up on the third, down on the second, up on the first. And then just slide that same shape up two frets to get our, like, root inversion of our E triad. And we'll do the same thing: down, up, down, up on the second, third, second, and first. Down, up, down, up. And then let's kind of come up here to the second inversion triad of an A and just kind of— so we've got Whoops, let's try that again.

Oh wait, let's try it again.

Okay, and then we'll come back down here, same deal. Now right here we're gonna do— all right, like so. That's 3rd fret of the 2nd string, 5th fret of the 3rd, open 2nd string, open 3rd string, 2nd fret of the 4th. All right, and then we'll come back up here and we'll do— and we're going to end this B part with the exact same phrase that we did on the first kind of original fiddle tune melody.

And we'll do—

okay, so again, like the second half of the more advanced version of Bill Cheatham of the B part. So we'll do All right, so let me just do all of like the B part on this second, more advanced version of Bill Cheatham here. So it's like, uh, All right, so let's go ahead and hear that second little slightly more advanced version of Bill Cheatham up to tempo with the backing track here. Okay, so I just wanted to, um, I just wanted to give you a basic fiddle melody version and slightly more advanced, very David Greer-inspired version of this tune because it's just, it's, it's one of my favorites. It's one of the best that you can learn for flatpicking guitar, and it's one of those where you can go to pretty much any jam session and people will probably, people probably know this tune. So remember what I was saying, you can get the tabs down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Thank you so much for hanging out today, and I will see you next time.