Aaron Jaxon teaches two flatpicking arrangements of the fiddle tune "Red Haired Boy." Break 1 covers basic position shifts for beginners. Break 2 adds cross-picking and slides inspired by David Greer, with altered chord voicings to make it jam-ready.
Hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today with 2 different ways of playing the classic fiddle tune Red Haired Boy. So this is about as classic of a flatpicking fiddle tune as it gets. You can go anywhere in the world where people play bluegrass music or they play bluegrass flatpicking guitar, and this is one that you can jam with people on. I've shared a bunch of fiddle tune lessons in this past year on this channel. I've organized those into a playlist and you can check that out. Down in the video description. What I wanted to do today is give you two different ways of playing this classic tune. In the first version, I'm calling it Break 1, we're just going to be doing a real simple, basic, bare-bones melody to this tune. But the second version of this is really cool but also really challenging. This is a very David Greer-inspired version of Red Haired Boy. It features a lot of crosspicking and slides and just really cool melodic and harmonic ideas in this tune. And I wanted to share this because I've been teaching this arrangement to my students for several years now, and they just love it. They love how challenging it is, but they love just how beautiful it sounds. The second version is a real head-turner if you can get it down and play it at jams. And again, it's very inspired by David Greer. So with this particular lesson, I decided to go ahead and just kind of pluck the lesson out of my Flatpicking Mastery 2.0 program, which you can check out down in the video description and I would highly recommend joining up. But this will feature close-ups of my picking and fretting hands. You'll get the scrolling tabs that go across the screens as I play each example. You can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. All right, let's jump into it.
Do it.
Let's go ahead and jump into Break 1's the basic melody of Red Haired Boy. Go like this. And there we have it. That's the, um, A part of Break 1. Pretty pretty straightforward there.
You may very well have already learned this tune.
On that part right there, as far as your left hand goes, I like to shift up right here and then back down and then right here. So it's like first position, third position, first position, second position. Okay, so it's, uh, You could also do it like, um, if you wanted to use your middle finger and pinky finger, but for me it's easier and just sounds a little more smooth.
You know what I'm saying?
That's how, like, you know how a lot of times you watch Tony Rice, if you watch any recordings or if you ever saw him live back in the day, a lot of times he's playing this really fast stuff, but sometimes it doesn't even look like his fingers are moving that fast. He would do stuff like that. Um, so anyway, there is the A part of break 1. Let's do the B part of break 1. It'll go like this. And there we go. So there's the B part of break 1. So one more time, let me go all the way through and I'll do the A and the B part of break 1 for Red Haired Boy. So here is the A part of break 1. Be part of Break 1. Okay, so there's the A and the B part of break 1. So now we're gonna make this tune really interesting, and we're gonna go into break 2 here. And let me just go through here before I talk about it here. Let me just go ahead and play all the way through the A part of break 2. Okay. Okay, so some cool things happening in there. So at the kind of the beginning of this second break, if you will, we're taking the main melody and we're just— we're, we're making it a little bit more busy.
We're filling up more space instead of just— but then after that, we're go and we'll do this.
So that little part right there is really cool. And I'm just going through and just doing some basic cross picking on that. It's just down, up, down, up on the 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st.
And then All right, and then—
okay, so I love that little part, but then it gets even more interesting on the B part of break 2. Okay, so this will be the B part of break 2.
Okay, so a lot of really cool things happening in there.
So at the beginning of it here, we do this little— okay, so I'm not gonna get too deep into theory here, but the chords on that— and so instead of doing that little 7th chord, he's doing like a 5 minor, which just has a really pretty pretty sound to it.
And then just back to that melody. And then we'll throw in some more crosspicking.
We'll do Okay, so again, a lot of ideas really inspired by David Greer there, but it's just kind of putting a fresh little spin on a real familiar tune like Red Hair. Okay, so this will be the A part of break 2. Be part of Break 2. And there we have it. So there's a real basic melody version, but also a really cool kind of different David Greer-inspired, um, version of Red Haired Boy that you can work into your playing. It's also great for practicing your crosspicking technique. Just a whole lot of good stuff right there. So as always, reference the tabs, um, to get the exact pick strokes and all of that good stuff. Plug it into the Guitar Pro program, you can play along with the tabs if any tempo that you like. It's so cool. Practice along with the backing tracks. I've got everything here for you to be able to practice this tune and these ideas at any freaking tempo that you like. It's very cool, and I'm so excited to be sharing this information with you. All right, great job, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
