Aaron Jaxon teaches two flatpicking arrangements of the traditional tune "Forked Deer" using open-C shapes with a capo on the 2nd fret. He walks through a basic melody version, then an advanced arrangement with octave jumps and cross-picking licks inspired by David Greer's recording.
Today I'm going to be showing you two different ways of playing the classic fiddle tune "Forked Deer." Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today. With part 3 of a 20-part series that I'm doing around classic fiddle tunes that flatpicking guitar players need to know. And today we're going to be jumping into the classic tune Forked Deer. I love this tune. I've always loved jamming on this tune. It's so much fun to play. It's got a fairly busy melody but also leaves a lot of room for improvisation and a lot of other cool stuff like that. The first place that I ever heard it was David Greer's killer recording of it on Panorama album. There's been lots of great recordings of this tune over the years, and I've linked to some of my favorites down in the video description, which you can check out. So I'll be showing you a basic melody version and then a version that's a little bit more advanced, where I take the melody up and down an octave in certain places and throw in a couple of licks and passages to spice it up just a bit. As always, you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. So let's go ahead and jump into the basic melody version here. So I'm going to play this along with a backing track, and again again. This is just the basic melody of Forked Deer, but I'm gonna put the chords up on the screen here. The chords will be relative to the capo, and remember, each chord gets 2 beats, so that'll sound like this. Okay, so let's jump in and learn the basic melody to Fork a Deer. All right, so basic melody to Fork a Deer, and that's going to go like this.
1 and 2 and 3, e and a, 4, e.
Okay, and that's the A part. We just play that twice. Okay, so it's great because it's all kind of right out of this C shape, even though the capo's on the 2nd fret. This is technically a D chord here, but the melody's just kind of right out of this shape here. All right, we just play that twice. Okay, so, uh, now let's go into the B part here.
And, um, so that's going to go like this, uh, 1, E, and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e.
We just play that again. Okay, and so the chords on that, I think we do 6 beats of our G shape. It's technically an A chord.
1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.
6 beats at the beginning of that. So, um, there we go. So one more time, just the basic melody of the B part. And then we just play that twice there. So once again here, now that we've learned the basic melody to the A and the B part here, let me play that along with the backing track again. Again, this is Forked Deer, basic melody of the A and the B part, and I'll go like this. So let's do a little bit more of an advanced version here, but before I teach it to you, let me play it for you along with the backing track, and that'll sound like this. So we'll do a little bit more of an advanced version of the A part here, and it'll go like this.
1 and 2 and 3 and 40.
Okay, so we're making it a little bit of a busier melody there. I'm—
instead of just— we're doing, um, and then we're taking that up an octave. Um, okay.
So again, just playing around with it just a little bit, but now let's go into the B part here, and we'll go 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Okay, so I'm taking a little bit more liberty there with the B part of this tune and coming in. Okay, and then going back to the, to the original melody. All right, and then coming over here and doing this little kind of, you know, which is almost kind of like a mandolin sounding lick. And then back to our melody, and then ending with this very David Greer sounding kind of, um, descending cross picking thing. Okay, so just throwing in a couple of cool little ideas there, taking a little bit of liberty with the melody in places and spicing it up just a bit there. So one more time, let me play that second version of Forked Deer up to tempo with a backing track. That'll sound like this.
