Master David Grier's Epic Bluegrass Guitar Solo To "Molly And Tenbrooks"

Hey y'all, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you again today, and I'm very excited to share this lesson breakdown tutorial with you here. This is David Greer's solo to Molly and Tin Brooks This comes from a kind of a tribute album to Bill Monroe called True Life Blues, and I'll link down to the original recording down below here in the video description. And I'll also have a link to the tabs for this lesson as well.

So let's just jump in here and let me go through—

well, I tell you what, you've already heard me play it in the performance. Part at the beginning of the video. Let me just go through the whole thing, play it really slow here for you. So it's gonna go like this. So this solo is— it's, it's short, but man, it's sweet. And, uh, this is— this has always kind of been one of my favorite, um, bluegrass lead solos because honestly, we or at least the last time I checked, there's not a whole, whole lot of David Greer solos to these like traditional vocal tunes, these like traditional bluegrass standards. Now obviously he's played and recorded a ton of the classic fiddle tunes. He's also a, you know, he writes really, really cool tunes and he has a long, you know, discography of original music there. Um, but you don't hear him playing a whole lot of like these type of like bluegrass standard vocal songs, if you will. So it's really cool to hear his take on a tune like Molly and Tenbrooks because it's, it's very melodic. He really honors the melody in this solo, but he definitely puts his own stamp on it for sure. So at the beginning here, and you know, I'd say most of y'all watching this know the tune Molly and Tenbrooks. If not, I mean, there's a bunch of recordings on that. The Bluegrass Album Band did it. It's originally Bill Monroe. I think it was on, I think, some of the first bluegrass recordings. My bluegrass history is a bit hazy there, so don't quote me on that. But anyway, so the melody of the tune Something along those lines there. So he does a fantastic job of honoring the melody in this while at the same time putting his own stamp on it. So at the beginning—

and I like to play that all with downstrokes, okay? And then we'll do—

so at that point it's all downstrokes. Okay, and then so, so we're getting some of that classic David Greer stuff, which is the slides and the cross picking, which he does a lot of. He does a lot of slides and a lot of cross picking. Okay, and then, so you got to watch it on that because that is just— we're holding like a C shape there and cross picking through that. But when you play that up to tempo, that's a lot more challenging than you might think because we're doing alternate picking, but every— but we're picking across all the adjacent strings there. So that's a good thing to practice, just That's a great thing to practice because, you know, you want to minimize the tension in your picking hand and give it a, give it a range of motion. Like, I usually tell my students that if I'm, if I'm doing, if I'm picking the first string, I don't, I don't want my hand to be in that position because that produces unnecessary tension. Just lighten up on that thing.

You know, and that's a great thing to practice.

But anyway, let's keep going here.

We'll do—

and then— so let's take it from the beginning of this solo back up until that point before we go on.

So we've got All right, and then we'll do—

so again, he's honoring the melody in this.

Okay, but again, playing around with it a little bit.

And then now he goes into this other part, which is one of my favorite parts of the solo, and we're gonna do— all right.

And he does— so what—

so that is—

because that's over our 5 chord right there. So we've got this, we've got our major 3rd, our dominant 7, we've got our root right here. But then at the beginning of this, he brings his pinky up right here to give it that that dominant 9th, give that, that 9th feel.

So we get—

and that's just a really cool thing because it gives it just a little bit of a, of kind of a jazzy flavor there. It happens real quick and he goes right back out of it into a slide there. Again, very, very classic David Greer stuff here. Okay, so that's a really cool thing. So we would normally— so again, we've got that dominant 7—

I'm sorry, the major 3rd, dominant 7, root, but then he brings it up here. Okay, and then from there, pretty simple. And then we're going to come up here, we're going to do slide into that, and then Again, classic David Greer stuff.

A lot of slides here.

And then from here, he's gonna do—

all right, so we're gonna do So we're going to slide from this, um, and then, and then he hits the first string open after that.

Okay, so again, just that last phrase on that.

Okay, so let me take it kind of from the second half of that solo again.

So, um, okay, so this is—

it's not a long solo, it's very short. But it's, it's, it's one of my favorites because he honors, he honors the melody, plays around the melody, but really puts his own stamp and he puts his own style on there with the cross-picking, with the slides, and even just that little bit of jazzy influence.

All right, so one more time, let me go through this whole thing.

I'll play it really slow and then I'll put the performance video back up on here. That way you can hear how it sounds up to tempo and in the context the song. So one more time, so we'll do Okay, so let's hear how that sounds in the context of the song and up to tempo. All right, so some really cool things in this solo, and I say this, um, whenever I'm doing these kind of note-for-note lesson breakdowns of these solos is I don't want you to think of this just as this is the solo that I play when I'm playing Molly and Tin Brooks.

Kind of look at some of these ideas and see if you can move those around.

So that— and again, that's, that's more challenging than it may seem because we're just cross-picking through a C shape. Um, but it's also really effective because, I mean, I'm sure there's, there's a lot of tunes where you could—

you know, it almost has a Norman Blake or kind of Tony Rice thing.

And then, and especially right here, that, that's something to, to mess around with and see if you can use that in places. Especially if we're doing a, you know, like any kind of a bluegrass standard through a G, C, and D shape, even though the capo is on the 3rd fret here, so it's technically B-flat, E-flat, and F. But that's— it would be cool to try and move that around, you know, and play that in some other places with that kind of—

and then other these other little slots.

Those are just some cool ideas to get underneath your fingertips and just spend a little time each day as you, as you hopefully go through and learn some of these solos, to just take some of these ideas, add that to your toolkit, your bag of tricks, whatever you want to call it, and spend a little bit of time each day just kind of letting your mind get creative. You can do that just on your own. You can do that jamming with some backing tracks or some records and just see if you can pull from some of these ideas and use that to come up with your own leads there. So anyway, I've been wanting to do a lesson video on this, on this solo for, for a while now just because I really like this solo a lot. And again, I will link to the recording down in the video description, and you can also get the tabs for this lesson for free down in the video description. As always, thanks for hanging out, and I'll see you next time.