Pickin' 101: 4 Simple Bluegrass Leads

Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today. So bluegrass lead can be a really, really challenging thing. To learn and to get down. There's just so many moving parts, right? There's the picking and there's the technique, and then there's, you know, the hundreds of fiddle tunes that you're supposed to learn, and there's all these ideas that you're supposed to learn from, like, the great players like Doc Watson and Tony Rice and Billy Strings and David Greer, and, you know, all of this stuff that you're supposed to learn and have a grip on, and it can really get overwhelming. I know it was the case for me for a long time, and it's that way for a lot of my students. So what I wanted to do today was just simplify this stuff for you and just give you 4 really simple bluegrass leads to play through a G, C, and a D chord progression. Now, despite the simplicity of these ideas, if you'll get these down, and you'll get them down with the right technique, and you'll play them smoothly and cleanly and in time, these ideas will really give you a solid foundation that you can build from, and it will make learning the rest of this style a lot easier, and it will make it make a lot more sense. If you'll stay till the end, I'm going to play all 4 of these ideas along with my 2 very favorite tools to practice along with. So stay till the end of the video to check that out. Also, if you'd like to get your own copy of the tabs for these ideas, I've got a link down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. So without further ado, let's jump into the lesson. So for this first idea here, I'd say a lot of y'all are familiar with the old G run, right? Y'all know Uncle Penn. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the G run and we're then gonna turn it into a C and a D run. Okay, so this first example will be this. We'll do Okay, so a few things here on the technique side. Now, I'm not going to go into a super deep dive in this lesson, But remember, these ideas are going to be played as 16th notes. They're not 8th notes. Sometimes we'll tab these out as 8th notes because they're a little easier to see on the page. They're not as jumbled up. Um, but when we're talking about playing these ideas in the context of bluegrass music, they fall as 16th notes, not 8th notes. Okay, so we count 16th notes like this: 1-e-and, 2-e-and, 3-e-and, 4-e-and. It's 4 notes per beat, and we're going to have downstrokes falling on beat 1, upstroke on E, downstroke on and, upstroke on uh. All right, so 1, E, and, uh. And we will stay consistent with that as we go through and play all of these lead ideas. So I don't want to get too bogged down with that right now, but if you'd like a much deeper dive where I really go in and talk about that a whole lot more, check out these 2 lessons right here, and I'll link to them down, um, in the, uh, in the video description. But again, And that's where our pick strokes are going to be falling. Okay, and then that idea is going to come in 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a, 1-e-and-a. So it's going to come in on the and of beat 4. I just, I like to throw that out there because a lot of times students with this idea will want to come in on beat 1. They'll be like 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a. And it just doesn't sound right. It doesn't. It's 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a, 1. So that 1 will actually hit on this note right here. Okay, so what we're going to do is play that idea twice, and then we're just going to come over to C because now the chord progression is going to go to a C, and we're going to essentially do a C run.

It'll go like this.

Pick strokes still doing the same thing. And then as we get to D, we're gonna come down here on the 6th string, and then we'll go back to G. Okay, so again, we're just taking that G run, but then we're moving it through C and moving it through D. And now what you're gonna start getting a feel for is the way the technique is played and and the way we play bluegrass lead ideas through a chord progression. It's one of the most important things, you know, um, in certain other styles. I mean, just kind of depending on the style, but like a lot of times in blues or in a lot of forms of rock, you know, they can kind of just stay in one key, um, the whole time. Like for instance, if they're playing like a blues in C, they can just kind of stay in C and it works and it sounds amazing. And I love that stuff. But when we're doing bluegrass, this is a little bit more the way that like jazz players and country players to a certain extent too, but especially like jazz and swing players play through chord changes is we deliberately target, you know, the notes in the chords that we're playing. But I don't want to get too bogged down with theory here. Just learn these ideas, get them under your fingers, and then all of this stuff will kind of start to open up to you. So one more time, just this first example here. All right, over to C now.

D, and then back to G.

Okay, and there's your first bluegrass lead through G, C, and D. It's simple, it's simple. Okay, cool. So now I want to take you into the second idea here, and with this one, I'm— we're just going to embellish on that first one just a little bit. I'm going to add just a little bit more to it, okay? So the second idea, I'll go all the way through G, C, and D, and that's going to sound like this.

To C. To D. Back to G.

Okay, so it's, it's essentially the same idea from the first one, but I'm adding in just a couple of extra notes. So instead of on our G run just doing— I'm, I'm kind of of combining those back down. Okay, for just kind of like a— like, it's like an extended G run. And remember what I was saying about the pick strokes.

Um, 1-E-And, 2-E-And, 3-E-And, 4, E and O, 1, E and O, 2, E and O, 3, E and O, 4.

So remember, my downstrokes are falling on the downbeat of the measure. And when I say the downbeat of the measure, it's just 1, 2, 3, and 4. That's our downbeat. So the downstrokes are falling on the downbeat and on the and and the upstrokes are falling on the E and, uh, because we're playing these as 16th notes. So, um, let's see here. 1 E and 2 E and 3 E and 4 E.

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

It really is a very, very, very simple idea. It takes a while for that to become a habit, but the idea is so simple there. It really is. So anyway, that's our idea through G. Let's go to C now.

Back to G. There we go.

All right, so now we've got two really cool bluegrass lead ideas through G, C, and D. And again, we're dialing in our technique and we're getting some really cool ideas underneath our fingers that sound very bluegrass-y. But you're also seeing how we play through a chord progression in a bluegrass lead style. So there's our first two. Now, great news here on idea 3 and 4, we're just gonna do the same thing and I'm gonna move it up an octave. That's it. So idea 3, we're gonna do this. It's gonna be just like idea 1, to C. to D, back to G. We're doing the exact same thing with our pick strokes on these ideas as we were doing down here on the first two.

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

And our pick strokes are falling right where they need to fall rhythmically. So that's our idea for G. For C, we're going to come over here, and then for D, we'll be up here, and then we'll go back to G.

There we go.

So mostly what I want, what I want you to get out of this is the technique and also just the musical ideas. But, you know, I know a lot of people are kind of, you know, a little curious behind the theory, um, around some of this stuff. So with this idea right here, you can think of it like if you're doing the CAGED system, that's kind of out of like your, your, your C-shape G chord. And you can also think of it out of like, um, I guess this would be like pentatonic pattern 4 G, or like the, um, major scale pattern 3 maybe. Again, I don't want to get too deep into that, but that idea is kind of based around either that little C-shaped G chord, or like your pentatonic, or your major scale, you know. So you can think of it like that for C, for this idea out of C. You know, you can kind of think of it like the— your C major pentatonic, you know. I guess that's more of like a major blues scale. And same deal with D. So that's kind of where those ideas are coming out of. Anyway, I don't want to get too bogged down in like the scales and, you know, the CAGED system and all that good stuff. But anyway, so that was That was idea number 3. Let's do idea number 4. And idea number 4 is essentially going to be the same thing that idea number 2 was. We'll do it like this.

Back to G.

So there we go. All right, so 4 bluegrass lead ideas there through G, C, and D. And it's, it's, it's just funny. I wish somebody would have sat me down whenever I was like, man, I want to get into flat picking, I want to get into bluegrass. I wish somebody would have sat me down Aaron showed me these ideas, showed me the right technique, and be like, hey, now here's some tools to practice your timing with. So like I promised at the beginning of the video, what I want to do now is I want to show you my 2 favorite tools to practice these ideas along with. So the first one is going to be a train beat drum track. I'm not going to play this very fast. I think this is at about 50 or 60 beats per minute, and I'm going to play all 4 of those ideas along with the train beat. That's going to sound like this. All right. We'll let that drum play for a little bit. 1 and 2 and 3 and— Example 1.

Example 2. Example 3. Example 4.

There we go. Pretty cool. I love practicing along with that train beat because that drummer is spelling out those 16th notes on the snare drum, and it makes it really easy to play in time with. But I also love practicing along with the Strum Machine because then that kind of gives us a much more kind of bluegrass context, um, to these lead ideas. And you've got, you know, the kind of AI guitar strum and mandolin chop to, um, you know, be able to hear the chord changes as you play those ideas. So let me go ahead and play all 4 of those along with the strum machine, and that will sound like this. 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Example 3. Example 4.

Okay, so simple ideas here, but it will teach you so much about bluegrass lead, about flat picking, especially with regards to the way that we play bluegrass lead ideas through chord changes. That's a huge part of this style of guitar playing. It'll teach you a lot about the technique and where your pick strokes fall, and it will also show you how to practice your timing And if you can start working on all 3 of those areas, man, you're going to have a great foundation and, you know, if you will, a little bit of an unfair advantage when, you know, you progress in this style and you go on to learn, you know, other more advanced, more complicated stuff, if you will. So remember, you can get the tabs down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. And also, if you'd like to go a whole lot deeper and get some much more advanced ideas through, through G, C, and D, please check out this video right here. All right, thanks as always for hanging out, and I will see you next time.