In this tutorial Aaron Jaxon demonstrates three bluegrass position‑shifting guitar runs designed to help players move smoothly up and down the neck, breaking free from the habit of staying in the first few frets. He explains why left‑hand economy is as crucial as the picking hand in bluegrass, outlines the fingerings and slide techniques for each run (including index‑middle‑middle patterns, ring‑finger slides, and transitions between major pentatonic, minor pentatonic, and blues‑scale shapes), and shows how to combine the three into a single "monster" run that spans from the open string to the 12th fret and back. Throughout, he stresses a practice philosophy of "slow is smooth and smooth is fast," recommends strict 16th‑note timing without pauses, and provides practical advice on chunking the material, using tabs in the description, and employing a backing track. The lesson concludes with encouragement to integrate these runs into broader bluegrass soloing vocabulary.
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you some bluegrass position shifting runs that are going to get you moving effortlessly up and down the fretboard and are going to have you shredding bluegrass licks like a pro.
Stick around.
Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today. So what I've got for you today are a couple of bluegrass position shifting runs. Now I have shared ideas similar to this on this channel before, but it's been a hot minute and I wanted to revisit the topic for a couple of reasons. Number one, in bluegrass, our picking hand gets most of the attention because this style requires more out of our picking hand than just about any other style of guitar playing does. However, the left hand is just as important, and what these runs are going to show you how to do is to how to move up and down the fretboard in an economical manner. And we want to do that for a couple of reasons. Number 1, when we're playing bluegrass lead, a lot of times we get stuck down here in these kind of first 3 to 4 frets, you know, when we're playing these ideas like, you know, or love all of that really classic Tony Rice sounding stuff, but sometimes we get a little stuck down here. So these runs are going to have you going from the open string all the way up to the 12th fret and back down again. So you're not going to be confined to these like bottom, you know, 3 or 4 frets. But also, this is a great primer for going in and learning bluegrass solos. I started developing these bluegrass position shifting runs a couple of years ago when I would get students that would come to me wanting to learn bluegrass, and I would immediately have them learning like Tony Rice or Billy Strings or Doc Watson or Brian Sutton button solos. And it became clear very early on when I was teaching people that, that a lot of them didn't know how to shift up and down the fretboard in an efficient way to make their leads sound nice and smooth and clean. So that's what these runs are going to show you how to do today. I'm going to show you 3 of these, and then at the end I'm going to show you how to string all of these together in one monster run that takes you from the open string to the 12th fret and back down again. As is always the case, you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Okay, so position shifting run number 1. So that's gonna go like this.
We're gonna do— all right, let's try that again.
Okay, so the beginning of that lick should sound pretty familiar. You know, that's kind of tone Tony Rice, red-haired boy. But what we're gonna do now, right here, use your index finger and then middle, middle, and now our left hand is in a position to play the rest of that lick. Okay, so though there's a couple of key, um, places in there where you want to make sure you're using the right finger. So, so index right here, middle, middle. That may not seem like that, um, significant of a detail, but it is.
Okay, and I'm using mostly alternate picking.
I'm doing a couple of slides there. I'm not going to get super into that for this lesson, but I'm doing 16th notes, downstrokes on 1 and upstrokes on E and A. And I like to show that to people because I've shown that to people before and I didn't emphasize the left hand fingers, and people would end up trying to play it like You know, you know, which is just painful. Okay, so that first run again there.
Okay, so there we go.
There's our first little bluegrass position shifting run. This is out of G. Let's go to the next one here, and that's going to go like this.
Okay, I'll do that again.
Okay, so with this one, we're kind of starting here like in our major pentatonic, but up here on these first two strings, we're doing So it's kind of going from that major pentatonic up into the minor. Now this is important right here. So when we're starting off with this lick, do this slide with your ring finger, and then index, middle, middle. And now we can position shift.
And when we're coming back down, ring finger—
do that ring finger for the slide from 7th 5. You can eat— you can do 3rd fret, 4th fret, 3rd string open, or 3rd fret, 4th fret, 5th fret of the 4th string. Okay, so again, the key places in this one here, right here with your ring finger, and then right here, let's do index, middle, middle, and now we've shifted And then when we're coming back down, ring finger right here. Okay, so that's a great little passage there that gets you from, you know, from like the 3rd fret up to the 7th fret and then back down again. Okay, very usable bluegrass passage there. But again, the key places: ring finger right here, index middle, middle, and then ring for the slide back down. Okay, so there's two of them there. Let's do a third one. And now this third one, we're going to start up here on the 6th fret, go up to the 12th, and come back down. So we'll do Okay, so we're really getting up on the neck here, especially for like some bluegrass ideas there. But we're going to start down here and then ring finger right here, ring finger Okay, one more time on that one.
Ring finger, slide. Slide.
Okay, so again, that's taken us from kind of our third minor pentatonic, or the, the second minor pentatonic, up to the third, and then we're kind of coming into this major blues scale pentatonic thing coming back down. Okay, so let's try that one one more time. This is our third one here. We'll do Okay, so there's 3 little bluegrass position shifting runs there.
This first one, okay. Our second one, and then our third one.
And so the name of the game whenever you're learning these— like, what most people do when I teach them this is they immediately go for speed. And I've taught this to students before, and I'd show it to them, and then they show back up, you know, the next week, and they play it like, you know, like that number right there. Remember this phrase: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Get this slow and smooth first, and once you you've got that, once it's slow, once it's smooth, once you've got your timing down, it's going to be a whole lot easier to build speed from there. And that's another thing too with these. These are all— I think all of these are straight 16th note runs. So that's another thing that I would see students sometimes do whenever they're learning these, that they put these unnecessary pauses in some of these lines. You know, or like which that would be fine if that was the phrasing we were going for, but for these we want that straight 16th. Get them slow, get them smooth, get the good technique, get the good timing, and then from there we can speed those up. It's a whole lot easier to build speed once we have a solid foundation set. Okay, so let's do one more here. We're going to string all of these together for one monster run, so here we go. This will be the, um, the 4th bluegrass position shifting run. We'll do And that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm just stringing all 3 of those lead lines together, all 3 of those bluegrass position shifting patterns that we learned earlier, for one run that takes you from the open string up to the 12th fret and back down again. I'll play it one more time here. Okay, so there are all of those lead lines strung together for one monster run. So I would recommend go— going through and small chunking those, getting those first 3 kind of smaller runs down first and then stringing them all together. But just for some context here, let me go ahead and play that monster run up to tempo and with a backing track. That'll sound like this. Okay, so just 3 bluegrass position shifting runs. And again, I wanted to show this to you for a couple of reasons. Number 1, to get you unstuck. From these kind of first, you know, kind of 3 or 4 frets there, because it's easy to get stuck in those frets when we're playing bluegrass. But also just to get you familiar and to get you comfortable with position shifting as you move up and down the neck. And then as you go through and you learn more of this style and you increase your vocabulary and you learn, you know, the great solos and the great tunes, you know, by the great players of this style, it will be easier to navigate and it will be easier to execute these ideas. Once you've got a solid foundation of technique, timing, and position shifting as well there. So again, the picking hand gets a lot of attention in this style, but the left hand is equally as important. All right, so I want to thank you so much for hanging out today. Check out some of these other videos here for a little bit of a deeper dive onto some of this stuff. As always, thank you so much for hanging out, and I will see you next time.
