The Alternate Picking Secret You Aren't Using

Today I'm going to be showing you some very important ideas around alternate picking, and if you'll get a good grip on this stuff, it can really go a long way in helping you lay a solid foundation as a player and really unlocking your potential as a bluegrass lead guitar player. Stick around to learn more. Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you. So in my opinion, the most important kind of foundational technique to learn and to get down for bluegrass lead guitar is alternate picking 16th notes. Now most people understand the down and the up picking part of alternate picking, where we pick down the string and then we pick up on the string, down and up. But equally as important as that is knowing what beats that we want our downstrokes to fall on and our upstrokes to fall on. Not nearly as many people understand that. And we do want to be practicing these ideas as 16th notes because most bluegrass lead ideas do fall as 16th notes. That doesn't mean we're only ever going to use 16th notes. A lot of times we'll use them in combination with 8th notes, quarter notes, and whole notes and all that good stuff. But the majority of this stuff falls as 16th notes, so you You want to get familiar and to get comfortable with playing 4 notes per beat. So what I'm gonna show you today is I'm gonna show you 3 very Tony Rice-inspired usable bluegrass licks. I'm gonna show you how to play each lick using all picked notes and how to play each lick using a combination of picked notes with pull-offs and slides. And we're gonna emphasize our pick strokes and where the pick strokes are falling rhythmically. I really do wish that somebody would've sat me down and shown me this stuff whenever I was first getting into this kind of guitar playing. So you can get the tabs down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. So let's go into the first lick here. Okay, so this first lick is gonna go like this. We'll do one more time. Okay, so remember, we're gonna play these as 16th notes, 4 notes per beat, which we're gonna count that like 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a. Check out this graphic real quick. And so we want downstrokes falling on 1, upstrokes on e, downstrokes on and, upstrokes on, uh, all right? That's kind of the general idea here. So this lick is going to come in on the and of beat 4. We're going to go 1, e and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e and 1, e and 2, e and 3, e and 4, e and 1, e and 2, e and 3 and 4 and. Okay, so this is— and all of these licks are basically like 2-bar phrases. Okay, so again, kind of focus in on my picking hand when I'm playing this. So I'll play the lick and I'll kind of call out the beats here and just kind of focus in on my picking hand on this. So we'll do 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and falling on 1 and, and upstrokes are falling on E and up. All right, now let's do that same lick, but we're going to do it with a combination of hammer-ons— or I'm sorry, a combination of like pull-offs and slides. We're gonna go And what you're gonna notice is with both of those licks, our pick strokes fall in the same place. There's just a few of them that we leave out. So, so in the version before that, we picked all of that. We did down, up, down. With this one, we'll do down, hammer, down. So there's technically two down strokes in a row, but again, that's we're keeping our pick strokes falling where they need to fall rhythmically. And 1, e, and 2. And 1, e, and 2. Falling exactly where they need to. And then Okay, that's all we're doing. There's just a couple of those pick strokes that get left out. So if you ever get confused when you're doing alternate picking and there's some of these phrases that have hammer-ons and pull-offs and slides, and you know, there's like 2 upstrokes or 2 downstrokes in a row, and you're like, what the heck, I thought alternate picking was all about picking down and up— it is, but it's also equally as, um, it's equally about your pick strokes falling where they need to fall rhythmically. And when we're doing 16th notes, again, downstrokes on 1 and, and upstrokes on E and, uh, one more time there, um, with the hammer-ons and pull-offs. We'll do Okay, there we go. Okay, so now let's do us a lick in C here, and that's going to go like this. We'll do that again. Okay, so same deal, we come in on the and of 4. 1-e and a 2-e and a 3-e and a 4-e and a 1-e and a 2-e and a 3-e and a 4-e and a 1-e And again, downstrokes falling on the downbeat and the and, upstrokes on the E and the ah. Okay, so now let's do a version of this lick where we throw in a couple little, um, uh, pull-offs. So we'll do Okay, so, so 2 down 2 upstrokes in a row.

So, uh, down, upstroke, pull-off, upstroke, down, up, down, up, pull-off, up, down, up, down, up, down.

But again, those upstrokes are falling right where they need to fall. So one more time, this little C lick with a combi— with pick notes and some pull-offs here. So now let's do one more lick here. We're going to do one out of D. Again, it's a very kind of Tony Rice-inspired lick out of D, and that is going to go like this. Okay, same deal coming in on the and of 4. 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a.

1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, 3-e-and-a, 4-e-and-a.

1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a, Okay, so again, downstrokes are falling on 1 and Upstrokes are falling on E and, uh, um, 4.

E and 1, E and 2, E and 3, E and 4. E and 1, E and 2, E and 3, E and 4.

Okay, all right, so now let's play that lick using a combination of pick notes with hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides.

It'll go like this, uh, 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2.

So again, our pick strokes are all falling in the same places. There's just a couple of them that we leave out. In certain places where we do a hammer-on or pull-off and a slide. And that's why it— you're essentially doing like 2 upstrokes or 2 downstrokes in a row. But again, that's just to keep the pick strokes where they need to fall rhythmically. Okay, so there are 3 licks, one in G, one in C, one in D, all very Tony Rice Inspired, but I've showed you how to play it with all picked notes and with a combination of picked notes, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides. And you can see exactly where our pick strokes need to fall. Now, one other very, very important thing to, to practice when you're getting this stuff down is your timing, okay? And y'all have heard me talk about this on this channel before here, but, um, you know, I, I really love practicing along with a train beat backing track. And a lot of people ask me, like, what app that I use, guys, I just use YouTube. Um, I get the YouTube Premium subscription. I pay the— I forget, you know, $17, $18, $20 a month, and I can practice along with this stuff uninterrupted. So I just look up train beats from different channels here. I've seen them as slow as 40 beats a minute. I've seen them as fast as 190 beats a minute. So I would really recommend, you know, getting that and then just being able to practice along with these drum tracks, um, you know, uninterrupted by ads. And I'll link down to the one that I'm using in this video, um, down in the video description. But what I want to do now, I'm gonna go through all of those licks, those 3 licks, you know, playing them with all picked notes and playing them with a combination of hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides. And I want to just play that along with my train beat drum track here so you can see how it sounds in time. I'm gonna play it pretty slow here at 50 beats per minute. Sound like this. All right, G lick 1, all picked notes.

With pull-offs and slides.

C lick or pick notes.

Pull-offs. De-lick all picked notes. Hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides.

All right, so there we have it. 3 licks there. I've shown you how to play the licks. I've shown you how to play it with all picked notes, with a combination of picked notes, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides. And we've emphasized not only the pick strokes but where the pick strokes need to fall rhythmically. And again, you can reference the tabs, uh, you can get those for free, and you can see exactly where those pick strokes fall because I've got it all written out there for you. So again, this is something I just wish somebody would have sat me down years ago and not only showed me how to play but kind of explained the concept to me. It would have made learning this a whole lot easier, so I wanted to pass that on to you. Check out some of these other videos right here to go a little bit deeper with this stuff. And again, thanks as always for hanging out, and I will see you next time.