In this instructional video, guitarist Aaron Jaxon demonstrates how to craft authentic‑sounding country and bluegrass lead lines by blending major and minor pentatonic (and blues) scales within a classic A–D–E progression. He walks through a step‑by‑step pattern: start with an A major pentatonic/blues shape, shift to its minor counterpart, then return to major, applying a characteristic chicken‑picking picking pattern (alternating pick and middle‑finger strokes). He repeats the same concept in the keys of D and E, showing how the shapes transpose up the neck. Throughout, he references real‑world examples—John Jorgensen’s solo on “Hello Trouble” and Johnny Hyland’s work with the Don Kelly Band—to illustrate the major/minor mix in professional recordings. Aaron stresses that the lesson is more about melodic ideas than pure technique, but he still employs the chicken‑picking articulation to give the lines a percussive “pop‑in” feel. He encourages viewers to practice the ideas with backing tracks, offers downloadable tabs via a link in the description, and frames the approach as a versatile addition to any guitarist’s vocabulary.
Chapters
All right, y'all, well, hello and welcome back to another country chicken picking lesson here. And what I've got for you today, um, are just some ideas that I wanted to give you on how you can create some kind of long flowing, really authentic, uh, country sounding lead lines by mixing major and minor pentatonics and blues scales. So, you know, a lot of times if I get a student that comes to me, you know, wanting to get into this or get into the bluegrass stuff, I mean, they're always asking, you know, like, what scales do you use? And for the most part, I'm not really thinking in terms of scales when I'm playing this stuff. However, this is kind of one exception to that rule, and I just wanted to show you just some really cool ideas that I use a lot that you'll hear a lot of the great country players using a lot. And again, if you'd like to get the tabs for this lesson, hit the— I've got a link down in the video description, and just hit that link and I will send the tabs to you. So let's start off with this first idea here. And so what we're gonna do here, I'm gonna take these ideas and we're gonna go through A, D, and E on these, okay? So what we're gonna do here, so let's start in A. So we've got our A minor pentatonic. Let's go ahead and spice that up by adding one note to it and making it an A minor blues scale. That's our A minor. And then our A major, you know, we would come down here and, you know, maybe do the relative minor or start from right here for the root note. And so our pentatonic— and if we spice that up and turn it into a blues scale Okay, so what we're going to do with this first idea, we're going to start in like the A major blues scale and we're going to do—
and then we're going to go to the minor and then back to the major.
Okay, let's do that again here. So we'll start in the major, minor, and with the technique there, since this is a kind of a a country chicken picking idea.
okay, so this is much more a kind of like melodic idea video. It's not so much a technique video, but since I'm doing these in the context of country chicken picking guitar, we'll definitely try to use that picking finger technique as much as we can to give it that little poppin', you know, chicken pickin' sound there. So one more time. So this is our A major blues scale, minor blues scale, major. And now what I want us to do, since we don't get stuck there, Let's move that up to D. All right, and we're going to come up here and we're going to do D major blues scale, which is going to be D minor blues scale, and we're going to do the same idea but in D this time. So we'll do So one more time, uh, major, minor, and then we're going to come up to E. So we're just going to move all of that up 2 frets and we're going to do And then let's jump back down to A again, major. Okay, so let's do that again here. So we'll do It'll start in A, D, E, back to A. Okay, there we go. So let's do one more here. And, uh, so this one's gonna go like this. So again, same deal, we're gonna go through A, D, and E, um, and we're gonna start off in our A major pentatonic slash blues scale and then jump up into the minor and then end back in the major. So for this one, we'll do— all right, so with this one, I'm running just straight up that A major pentatonic.
All right, and then from here we're going to slide up into the minor, uh, and then we'll jump and end back in A major.
There. So we've got major, minor, okay, and then we're just going to jump up and do the same thing in D. And then we'll jump up 2 more frets and do it in E. And then we'll jump back down to A. Okay, so one more time here. We'll do Okay, so there's just a few examples of how we will mix our major and minor pentatonics and blues scales to come up with some really cool sounding country ideas. And I mean, the, the, there's an infinite amount of examples out there. One example I like is, um, John Jorgensen's solo to Hello Trouble from the Desert Rose Band. At the beginning he does, and that's exactly that, that's That's exactly what that is. He's mixing, um, minor and major pentatonics. It's in C, so he's doing, which is minor, and then he slides up to major. Okay, so that's a great one. Um, uh, if you ever hear any of the stuff Johnny Hyland recorded with the Don Kelly Band, like when he's doing That's All Right Mama, which is like really fast, but like the lines he's playing is like, um, You know, so major, minor. So that's just another really cool example, and there's just a bunch of other ways you can— so that's like major, minor, and then ending with major right there. So I mean, the possibilities are endless here. But doing that, um, is, is one way to really give your lead lines a really kind of authentic, um, country sound, both in country and in bluegrass as well. So yeah, one more time, let's hear how these ideas sound in context with a backing track. All right, so I want to thank you for hanging out today. And as always, you know, practice these ideas along with one of those train beat backing tracks. I really like those. They're fun to play with, but they're also great for developing your timing. And you can just start to see how you can mix those two scale patterns and move them through a chord progression like that. And, you know, you can just add those lead lines to your vocabulary, to your repertoire, to your bag of tricks. Whatever friggin metaphor you want to use there. But anyway, as always, thank you for hanging out today. Again, remember to hit the link down in the video description to get the tabs for this lesson, and I will see you next time.
