Struggling With Speed?-Try This Instead

Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today. So bluegrass music and bluegrass guitar is a fast style of music and a fast style of guitar playing to get down. If you've ever seen the Ken Burns country music documentary, which I would highly recommend if you haven't, you'll know that the minute that Bill Monroe stepped on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, one of the things that really made bluegrass music stand out was how fast it was. People were astonished by how fast Earl Scruggs could play the banjo and how fast that Bill Monroe could play his mandolin and how fast that Chubby Wise would play the fiddle. People were like, they were really impressed by that. And after having taught bluegrass flatpicking guitar for a long time, I find that people say that that's the number one thing that they struggle with is the speed. But what if I told you that there's another element of your guitar playing that if you would focus on developing that instead, that it would instantly make your playing sound better, it would make it sound more professional, and it would be a whole lot easier to build speed from there? Well, there is an element, and that element is called smoothness. What I find with a lot of the people that say they're struggling with speed, they're not. They're actually struggling with smoothness. So for me, your guitar playing is going to sound smooth whenever you have good technique, you have good tone, and you have good timing. If you have all three of those together, your playing is going to sound smooth. And then once you get into the habit of making your leads and your solos and your licks and your fiddle tunes sound and feel smooth, it will be much, much, much easier to build speed from there. I promise you. So what I'm going to show you today is just 2 of my favorite little bluegrass licks, and I'm going to show you how to optimize your technique, your tone, and your timing for overall smoothness. And I promise, if you will develop this in your guitar playing, you will see some amazing results. And if you'll stay to the end of the video, I've got a really cool story about a guitar that I think a lot of y'all know and love that I'd love to share with you at the end of this video. So, all right, remember you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. Okay, so lick number 1 here, um, is gonna be this.

Okay.

I've shared this lick on this channel many times here. You know, like if you know the old classic Tony Rice, we're kind of taking the beginning of that and then position shifting a bit. Okay, so one more time, I'll play that lick one more time here. Okay, so let's first kind of optimize our technique here. Now, I have talked about this in many videos— these licks are played as 16th notes. And when we're doing our pick strokes on this, our pick strokes have a specific place they need to fall rhythmically. So we'll do down strokes on the downbeat of the measure and on the and, and we'll do up strokes on and, uh, 1-e-and, uh, 2-e-and, uh, 3-e. So this lick comes in on the and of beat 4.

1-e-and, uh, 2-e-and, uh, 3-e-and, uh, 4-e-and, uh, 1-e-and, uh, 2-e-and, uh, 3-e-and, uh, 4-e-and, uh, 1-e-and, uh, 2-e-and, uh, 3-e-and, uh, I'll play that again. And, uh, 1, e, and, uh, 2, e, and, uh, 3, e, and, uh, 4, e, and, uh, 1, e, and, uh, 2, e, and, uh, 3.

When I'm playing that, any time that I have a downbeat or an and, I'm picking down on that. Any time I have an e or an uh, I'm picking up on that. Now a lot of people say, but wait a minute, Aaron, you threw in 2 upstrokes. Isn't that breaking the alternate picking rule? It is not. Alternate picking is not always doing down and up picking no matter what. Alternate picking refers a lot more to downstrokes falling on 1 and and, upstrokes falling on E and A. So on this part right here, so I'm doing down, up, slide, up, down. All right, so it— yes, I did 2 upstrokes in a row there, but down, up, slide. I threw in a— I threw in a slide right there. If I were to pick that, down, up, down, up. Okay, so again, my upstrokes are falling right where they need to fall.

Down, up, slide, up. Okay, so rhythmically, that's 3, um, and a 4, and a 4, and a 4-e, and a 4-e.

So again, down, slide up. Again, those downstrokes are falling where they need to fall, upstrokes are falling. Now that's on the picking hand, okay?

That's on that.

So that's one part of our technique, but another part is our left hand. What we want is— I want to do a slide right there with my middle finger to get my left hand in a place to play the rest of that lick. Okay, so that's a big part of like position shifting in an efficient manner. Okay, so when it comes to technique, it's not just the picking hand and the pick strokes, it's your left hand and your picking hand working together to, to kind of, you know, minimize unnecessary motion, but also just come up with the most efficient ways of playing these musical ideas. Okay, so in that case, my pick strokes are falling where they need to, and my left hand fingers are working optimally to execute that idea. Okay, so that's the technique side of that. Now let's talk about the tone, and there's two things that I want to talk about. Granted, tone is a bit subjective. Some people, especially on acoustic, some people like a brighter tone, which I do, and then some people like a, you know, like kind of a darker tone. I remember back in the day I used to listen to music on CDs, and I had two great flatpicking records. I had Brian Sutton's first solo record, and I had Kenny Smith's Studebaker. And Brian's tone on that record is is like really bright, you know, when he's playing Decision at Glady 4. I'm slopping through it a little bit there. But then Kenny's tone when he's playing like Studebaker was like a lot darker. Both great, but it's just a little different. So tone is a bit subjective. However, you know, when it comes to, you know, whatever thickness of strings or thickness of pick— actually, for bluegrass, I'll use kind of a thin pick. I use a 1.14 millimeter. Here's the thing, I have never ever heard good tone coming from an acoustic guitar whenever we start getting back here on the bridge. Sucks. Don't do it, okay? I mean, unless like if I was playing in a country band and we were doing like Bucko and stuff and I wanted like a very stock Don Rich kind of You know, if I was going to do that. But when we're talking about generally playing bluegrass leads, here is what I recommend. I like my pick about right where the sound hole starts. Okay, Tim Stafford will play like up here in the middle of the sound hole.

He'll do like, you know, he'll play ideas like that, which, which sound great.

For me, I like my pick a little further back, kind of right about where the sound hole starts, but I don't like it any further back than that because it starts sounding really harsh. So there is that. Um, as far as the tone goes, here's another thing as far as the tone goes. Remember, like I was saying earlier, these ideas that I'm showing you here in most bluegrass lead needs to be played as a smooth flow of 16th notes. Okay, and so what I'll see a lot of times is, um, and maybe it's because people haven't learned the idea well enough, but they'll throw in these unnecessary pauses into lines like that.

They'll be like—

and if you're coming up with ideas, you know, that have a little syncopation in them, that's great. But for this idea, we want it Okay, so there is that. So when it comes to the tone, I would really recommend kind of getting up about right where the sound hole starts. I don't like it much further up than that, and I really don't like it much further than that. Another thing when it comes to the tone, we don't want these ideas to sound staccato.

We don't want—

now sometimes if I'm doing like country chicken picking, I go for a deliberate staccato sound. But when it comes to flatpicking leads, you want this stuff sounding smooth. And so you, you don't want a staccato sound.

You don't want— you want—

you hear the difference there? You want a really, really smooth flow of those uninterrupted 16th notes. Okay, so that's our tone here. Now for the timing. So what, what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to play this idea along with my two favorite things to practice my timing with. I'm going to play it along with the train beat drum track, and then I'm going to play it along with the strum machine, and that will sound like this. So always be practicing your timing. And with both of those, you know, you can use the Strum Machine to play this as slow as you want to. And I think with the train beat, I was playing that at about 50 beats a minute. You can play it slower if you want to. You can find— you can use a tool like Band in a Box. There's all kinds of cool things that you can use. But again, go slower and really, really kind of optimize these ideas. So again, technique, timing, and tone will give you a really smooth sound when playing this lick. So I want to do the same thing, uh, but I want to give you another one of my favorite licks to play here. That's gonna go like this. Okay, so let me play that lick a little bit slower here for you, and it'll go like this. Okay, so we just need to do what we did with the other lick there. We need to optimize our technique. Okay, so let's optimize our pick strokes here.

We'll do down, up, down, up, down, pull-off, down, up, slide, up, down, up, Down, up, down, up, slide, up, down, down, hammer, down, up, down, slide, down, hammer, down, up, down.

You want some zen training? Play an idea and say the pick strokes out loud. Okay, I don't really want to do that again, and also I'll have the pick strokes written out on the tabs here for you, but we want those pick strokes optimized. And again, they fall rhythmically where they're supposed to, okay? And then on the left hand, again, kind of optimizing our technique right here. Make sure we do this slide with the middle finger, and then right here let's slide with the pinky, but then let's catch this 6th fret on the 1st string with our index. Ring, index, middle, ring, index. Come over here with the ring for the slide.

Okay.

So we've got our pick strokes, we've got our picking hand and our left hand working together again to come up with the most effective and economical way of executing this musical idea. Now, you know, let's talk about the tone. Again, I, I like having my pick right about where the sound hole starts. Don't want to get back—

I don't like it. I don't like it.

And then again, where we're playing this idea as 16th notes, we don't want that sounding staccato.

We don't want—

okay, and usually if you're— if your leads are sounding that way, that's almost always because you've got too much tension in your picking hand. You've probably got too much of in your fretting hand, and you've almost certainly got too much in your body. Okay, so bring awareness to the tension, tension in your hands. Do your best to minimize that. I still have to work on that every day. But then from there, practice the ideas in time and practice them nice and slow. So again, I want to use the train beat and the strum machine to practice this idea along with, and that will sound like this. Okay, so there we go. There's just two of my favorite little bluegrass licks there, and I've shown you how to kind of optimize your technique, optimize your tone, and optimize your timing. It takes patience, it takes practice, it takes consistency. Consistency and time to get this stuff down. But I promise you, if you'll kind of just kind of change in your mind, um, you know, wanting to play fast to wanting to play smooth, your playing is going to sound so much better. It'll sound so much more professional, and it will make building speed a whole lot easier. So I promised a little story here at the end, and I'll try not to go too long here, but this was, this was a long time ago. I think this was 22 years ago, nearly 22 years this was, this was Merle Fest. I was at Merle Fest 2003, so I think I was 19. I was 19 years old. And, um, you know, they have, you know, banjo contests and guitar contests. And I don't remember what it was, um, I, I wasn't able to get there in time to enter the guitar contest, not that I would have had the balls to do it anyway. Uh, but anyway, so I just went to like watch the guitar contest. And I got there kind of toward the end, and I saw a couple of guys get up there, and they were all just trying to burn it up. They were trying to play really fast, and, you know, they sounded pretty good. But I saw like 2 or 3 of them get up there back to back, and they were all just trying to just burn it up. And then after that, there was a young man named Tyler Grant who got up there, and he had entered the contest, and he got up there and he started to play. And just a couple of bars into it, I was, I was, I was kind of, I was kind of spellbound because he was not playing as fast as the other guys in the contest were. He just wasn't. But he was so damn smooth, and he had such good tone, and the ideas sounded so good, and he had a great rhythm and and a great pulse to his playing. I mean, it was really impressive, and it was more impressive than the couple of guys that I had saw play before him that were all trying to just, you know, light the thing on fire. And, uh, you know, Tyler's gone on to become really one of the greats of this style. You know, I know, you know, a lot of y'all probably, you know, watch his lessons, and, uh, he's just— he's one of the very best players in this style. But that moment was just a paradigm shift for me on, like, smoothness is greater than speed. Smoothness is greater than speed. I had lots of teachers who tried to teach that to me for years because I put playing fast above everything else, but I, I promise you, if you'll have the ears to hear, smoothness is greater than speed. And if you'll take some of these ideas that I've shown you here today and start to use that in your guitar playing, your playing will sound so much better, and it'll be a whole lot easier to build speed from there. So remember, down in the video description and in the top pinned comment, you can get the tabs for these two licks. I want to thank you for hanging out today, and I will see you next time.