Mastering Simple Bluegrass Lead Guitar Techniques

3, 4.

Hey y'all, Aaron Jaxon coming to you today here, and I've got— I'm changing the format up just a little bit for today's lesson, and what I'm doing here is I'm just going straight into the camera. I don't have this thing like mic'd up. And then I'm going through Logic Pro and Final Cut like I do with a lot of my other videos. I'm just talking straight into the camera here because I want this lesson to be simple. Because what I'm gonna talk to you today about are just some simple bluegrass lead ideas that you can play through a basic G, C, and D chord progression. I find a lot of my students sometimes can kinda get hung up with some of the more advanced concepts, and I wanted to give just, it's not a lesson for beginner guitar players per se, but if you're kinda new bluegrass guitar playing, this is the perfect lesson for you. So as always, down in the description here I've got links to a free little 45-minute crash course that you can grab, and I've also got a link to my flagship online course called Flatpicking Mastery if you want like a real deep dive into this stuff. Alright, so what these ideas are gonna show you, or what it's gonna help you to do, is it'll develop your technique, it's gonna give you some really cool melodic bluegrass lead ideas, it's gonna show you how we're gonna play through a chord progression like G, C, and D, and it's also gonna help you with your timing. Because what I'm gonna show you here toward the end of the video is how to make a custom backing track in the Strum Machine app to practice these ideas along. And by the way, if you're, if you're into bluegrass guitar and you don't have the Strum Machine, if you haven't downloaded it, please do. It's one of the best things, if not the best thing, to come along for bluegrass guitar players in a very, very, very long time. And I promise you, it's an invaluable resource. Resource. They have a 14-day free trial, and then I think it's $5 a month after that. And they're not sponsoring this video, I just, I, I love practicing with it, and I know you will too. All right, let's crack into the lesson here. Okay, so first idea, um, let me play all the way through it here. We're just gonna do Okay, so what I'm doing there is I'm taking that what we would call a G run, and I'm just moving it to C and to D. Real quick, I wanted to talk to you about the pick strokes on that. So I'm doing down, up, down, up.

Up, down, pull-off, down.

So we've got 2 downstrokes at the very end.

Down, up, down, up, down.

And then we'll keep that picking pattern consistent as you go through the other chord changes.

And then same thing on D. And then back to G.

And you'll just do that idea twice on each chord. Okay, so simple, but some really usable ideas. And you're also getting familiar with playing through a G, C, and a D chord progression, which is the most common one that we use in, in traditional bluegrass. All right, so there's that one. Now the next idea, let me just play through it here. We're gonna do Okay, so very similar to the first idea, but I'm adding in just a couple of extra notes on that. And let's have a look at the pick string. Strokes here.

So we're going to do down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, down. Okay, down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, down.

So it's mostly just straight alternate picking, but so the 2 downstrokes happen whenever I throw a pull-off in there. So pull-off, so downstroke on the pull-off, do the pull-off itself, and then on the next note you'll hit— you'll do a downstroke on that. But it's mostly alternate picking through this.

Down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.

And then again, just take that idea and play it through the other—

play it through C. Okay, and then we'll go to D. And then back to G. There we go. All right.

So there's the first 2 ideas. So I've got 2 more that I want to show you, and really what they are, it's the same melodic ideas that we just did, but we're gonna move it up on the neck here. Okay, so let's go to example 3 here. That's gonna go like this.

We're gonna do—

actually, let me play all the way through example 3 here. So we'll do Okay, and all this is, it's the same notes that are in example 1, but I'm moving them up an octave and I'm moving it up on the neck. And then with this one, I'm picking everything down, up, down, up, down, down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. So no double downstrokes in that idea. Same thing over here on C, and then same thing up here when we come up to D, and then we'll go back to G. Okay, so that's example 3. Let's do example 4, and I'll play all the way through it here, and we'll do Okay, and then so again, that's like example 2, just moved up on the neck and moved up an octave. And again, it's just straight alternate picking all the way through that. Okay, so there you have it there. 4 very simple bluegrass lead ideas, but we cover a lot of really important ground because you're getting the melodic ideas that you want to play when we're doing bluegrass flatpicking leads. You're seeing how we move through a chord progression and how we play lead ideas to a chord progression. You're working on your technique because it's mostly alternate picking through that. And then we're also now going to talk about working on your timing. So what I want to do real quick here is just show you how to make a custom backing track in the Strum Machine that you can play along with and practice your timing with, and you can use it at any tempo that you want. All right, y'all, just real quick, I want to show you how to make a custom backing track for these examples inside of the Strum Machine. So, you know, whenever you download it, you know, you'll go through and you'll— this is usually the first page that you'll come to. You got the menu over here. What we want to do is go to New Song, and we'll go to New Song, and we can worry about putting the name on it later. But what we're going to do, let's choose a key, and for these examples that I'm doing in this video, we're in G. So we're going to go to G, and really each one of these here is one beat. You'll get like a boom, cha, boom, cha. Um, and what we want to do is we want 4 of G. 2, let's see here, 3, 4. And now we want to switch, so we'll just come down here and we'll go to C. And let's do 4 C. 1, 2— I'll do one more here. I hit it again. And now we'll go to D. And then we want to end with 4 more in G. Let me switch back to G. We'll do 1, 2, 3, 4. All right, and then you can switch the tempo down here. You know, if you want to go up, you can. I think that the one that I'm playing it with in this video is about at 80 beats a minute, which is a pretty moderate tempo. But let's make sure this is working here. We'll come up here and Uh-oh, and I made a mistake. This needs to be a G instead of a C. There we go. So yeah, just 4G, 4C, 4D, and then we'll do 4G again. And then, you know, you can come up there and title it, you know, Simple Bluegrass Lead Ideas or whatever you want to, adjust the tempo down there and practice these ideas. Along with this.

All right. 3, 4.

All right guys, thanks so much for hanging out today. I wanted to to do just a little bit more of a stripped-down basic lesson here for you today. As always, hit the links down in the description to get a free 45-minute crash course in this style where I kind of go through and cover all the bases. Or if you really want to go deep on this stuff, I've got a link to my online flagship bluegrass guitar course called Flatpicking Mastery. Check that out. I basically have everything that I know about this kind of guitar playing in that course. So again, thanks for hanging out. I hope these ideas are really useful to you. Um, practice these along with the Strum Machine because that's gonna help with your technique and it's gonna help with your timing. So again, thanks for hanging out and I'll see you next time.