How To Play Billy Strings' Most Epic Solo

Today I'm going to be showing you the most influential bluegrass guitar solo of all time. Stick around. Hey there, it is Aaron Jaxon coming to you today, and what I'm going to be showing you today is the mighty Billy Strings' famous solo to Dust in a Baggie. Now, I'm going to be referencing the original studio recording for this solo. I'll throw that out there because there's a lot of very famous live recordings of him playing this. There's the really famous basement recording, there's a really famous one where he plays this on the Grand Ole Opry, but what I'm going to be showing you today is the original studio recording. I'm going to be showing you the guitar break that he plays in this song. Some people may not like how I opened this video by saying this is the most influential bluegrass guitar solo of all time, but I really do believe that Billy as an artist and this song in particular has gotten more people into this style of guitar playing than anything else ever. But what's great about it is that this is an incredible solo. It's chock-full of amazing phrases that are great for adding to your vocabulary, and you can use them in so many other places in your playing. So as is always the case with my lessons, you can get the tabs for this down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. All right, so what I want to do now is I'm just going to go through the whole thing really, really slow. You heard me play it tempo at the beginning of the video. So I'm going to go through, play the whole thing really slow, and then we're going to go through and we're going to kind of take it section by section and analyze it a bit. So let me go through the whole thing nice and slow for you. I'll count us in and we'll go: 1, e and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e and All right, and there we have it. So, um, just a killer little 8-bar solo here. So what I want to do now, um, I tend to think of this solo in like 4 different phrases. It's an 8-bar solo, so it's like 4 2-bar phrases essentially here. But this, this first one here, now this is going to be really, really important. A lot of people, um, don't get this whenever they're learning these solos, is like where to come in, okay? And this first note is going to come in on the E of beat 4. I've talked about this many times on this channel, but most of these bluegrass solos that we're going to learn are played as 16th notes, and we count 16th notes like 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a. Okay, uh, check out this video right here, um, if you would like a, uh, you know, just kind of a, kind of a quick simple little crash course on that. But anyway, these are going to be 16th notes, and with this first note of the solo, we're going to come in on the, uh, of beat 4. It feels so stupid saying that, but that's what it is.

4-e-and-a-1. Okay, so when I'm counting that in, 1 and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e and 1.

Okay, so just remember, come in on the, uh, of beat 4. Okay, so 1, e and a 2, e and a 3, e and a 4, e and Okay, so just a classic Billy phrase that's obviously very Doc Watson inspired. And all of those notes are picked except for that very last, um, going from the 2nd fret to the open string, pull off on that 4th string. Okay, so, um, And that's mostly coming out of our, like, G major blues scale. He throws in a little flat 7 in there.

Um, okay.

And that little— where we're going in between the 3rd and 2nd string, that can be really challenging to get at quicker tempos. One thing that you can experiment with, and sometimes I'll do this if I'm playing this in you know, it gets kicked off really fast, is instead of doing that, I'll do— it's still the same notes, but it's a little easier to play faster.

It's a little bit easier, you know, just a little easier than that.

But that's the first little phrase here. Okay, and then we're going to come into this one, which I just love. Okay, and so what we're doing right there, okay, and that's really cool because what it is, we're in G and we're going from like G major up to like G kind of dominant 7 minor, if you want to think of it like that. But what, what he's doing there is he's throwing in that open 6th string, which that E is the 6th in G. So it's, it's, um, it adds some color to that phrase. And with your pick strokes on that, um, play it like this. Do up, slide, up, down, up, slide, up, down. All right, up, slide, up, down, slide, up, down. Okay, and then we're gonna do— and that's just, you know, going from that minor 3rd to the major third, and then he comes up just right down a G major scale, and then he throws in these kind of open, and then does this. Okay, and that's just— we're doing again, making use of that open first string, which again, that's the sixth in G. And when you're playing a tune in G minor, hitting that note, that's the 6th like that. Like, it just, it works and it adds some color to it. Okay, so that's kind of like the first half of the solo here. So again, from the beginning, um, we'll go 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and All right, and then now we're going to go into this really cool phrase where he does this little descending run down a G minor blues scale and does Okay, I just love that. Okay, Tony Rice used phrases like that all the time. Mark O'Connor uses a similar phrase in Dixie Breakdown. You know, just really cool stuff there, and it's coming out of that like pattern 5 blues scale, you know, out of G right there. So one more time. And even though he's staying in that minor pattern, at the very end goes back into major right there. And then from there we'll do Okay, so I love that passage there. It starts off with a kind of a standard G run, and then he comes back up here to this little sliding into that and then playing that open 6th string. So that little phrase right there My gosh, use that, put that in your vocabulary, use that as much as you can because it— again, it's kind of got a Doc Watson vibe to it, but it also is kind of mimicking like a banjo. All right, you hear Earl Scruggs do ideas like that all the time. All right, and then after that, he's going to do a little slide from 3 to 4. And then with this little bend right here, I do recommend doing this with your middle finger because Bending the 5th string on an acoustic guitar is not easy. Fortunately, this is like a 4th step bend. It's not even a half step bend because we're not bending all the way up. It's just real short bend, about a 4th, and then ending with— and then, okay, so that last phrase again. So one more time, the second half of the solo. So we're doing Okay, one more time. Let me go through the whole thing here for you. And remember, we'll come in on the, uh, of beat 4.

So we'll go 1 and 2 and 3 And 4, e and.

All right, so let's hear it one more time up to tempo. I've said this on this channel many times here, but when we're going through and we're learning, say, Tony Rice solos or Billy String solos or Brian Sutton or Doc Watson or, you know, David Greer or whoever it is, the point of learning this is not just to become a clone, is not just to become a copycat. What we want to do is learning a few of these solos by a handful of different players, in my opinion, is about the best best thing that you can do for developing your bluegrass lead guitar vocabulary. It's just a great way to see how, like, Kenny Smith approaches playing solos versus how Tony Rice versus how David Greer versus how Molly Tuttle versus how Brian Sutton versus how Billy Strings does it. And then once you get a handful of these underneath your fingers and you get them memorized and you get them into that muscle memory, these ideas will start coming out in your playing. So I just like to throw that at the throw that in at the end of the video here to let you know we're not just doing this to become copycats. We're doing this to get these phrases, to get these licks, to get these ideas under our fingers. That way we can use them and use our own versions of them in our own playing. So I want to thank you so much for hanging out. Check out some of these other classic bluegrass solos that I've done lessons on this channel here for. As always, thank you for hanging out, and I will see you next time.