The Ultimate Bluegrass Guitar Workout For Speed And Accuracy

Hey, you want to build speed? You want to shred? Well, stick around because today I'm going to show you what I have been practicing for years that has worked for me, it's worked for my students, and I know it'll work for you too. Well, hey there, it's Aaron Jaxon coming to you today, and I want to welcome you to a little speed building lesson. I just want to show you what I have been practicing for a long time now that has enabled me to develop, you know, a certain level of chops. But I've also shared it with my students, and I've seen them get great results as well. I'm going to show you some simple warm-ups. I'm going to show you some technique exercises I practice every day. I'm going to show you how I push myself to play at tempos that are faster than I'm comfortable playing at. And I'm also going to show you how to apply what you practice building speed with in a classic bluegrass tune. So let's go ahead and start with some simple warm-ups here. So I like starting with the John Petrucci left hand stretch exercises. It's basically like this: come over here and do this little diagonal thing, okay? Uh, for this example, pinky on the 12th fret, ring finger on the 11th of the 3rd, middle finger on the 10th fret of the 2nd, pointer finger 1st fret— I'm sorry, 9th fret of the 1st. Play that and then switch your middle and ring, and then we're going to kind of switch the whole thing right here. Okay, and then you can essentially move that shape around anywhere that you want to. You can move it down here, and where the frets are bigger, it makes you stretch a little bit more. And as simple as that may seem, that actually is a great thing to get the blood flowing into your left hand. Now, if you want to make that a little more challenging, take your pinky finger up a fret. It's more of a stretch. Move it over here. Sounds terrible, but I promise you it's great for getting the blood flowing into your fingers. And if you want to make that even more challenging, do that and then take your pointer finger and move that down a fret. And again, like, you see how well that'll get the blood flowing into your left hand? So again, but the basic example, come up here and then you can move it over here, you can move it over here. And if you want to make it more challenging, take your pinky up a fret fret. And if you want to make it even more challenging from there, take your pointer finger down a fret. Okay, it's just a great thing. I practice it every day and it gets the blood flowing into your left hand. It's a great warm-up. So from here, I do use picking exercises every single day. Now, um, you can reference these two videos right here because I've shown these exercises on this channel. I'm not going to go super into detail here today, but I will link to both of those videos down in the video description. And if you want a more detailed lesson on those, that's great. But I like these because it forces my hands to play things that are deliberately more difficult than what I'm going to be playing with the music that I'm working on. Okay, and so the ones that I really like— my favorite one probably is this little David Greer crosspicking thing. Sounds like the beginning to Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day, but it's not. And what we're doing there: down on the 4th, up on the 3rd, down on the 2nd, and then this big jump. We come back and do up on the 4th. Okay, do that twice. And then we'll end with down on the 4th, up on the 3rd, down on the 2nd, up on the 3rd. So that whole gives it a really cool, like, banjo roll sounding thing. And again, it really makes your picking hand work, especially with that switch from the down on the 2nd string to the up on the 4th string. So I practice that every day. I also love my little diagonal exercise, the one that goes— that's a great picking and fretting exercise because on your picking hand you're doing straight cross picking, so it gives it a great workout and it gives your left hand a great workout too. And then two other ones that I really like to practice, they're essentially the same thing, but like take a G chord and do—

that one's great.

And you can also do that with like a, like an E-shaped bar chord. So anyway, I like to just cycle through those four picking exercises. That's just a really great thing to start to oil the machinery of my picking hand. Really start to get the blood flowing and get me ready to build some speed. Which brings me to the next part here. Okay, so there's a bunch of different ways to do this, but what I'm going to do here for, for just today is I'm just going to give you a speed building lick, and then what we're going to do is we're going to chunk it down while we're increasing the tempo significantly. Okay, so I have showed this lick on this channel before, but I love it. It's great to practice, and it's a very kind of Cody Kilby, Jake Workman sounding thing that goes like this. All right, let's do that again.

One more time.

Okay, so that's just a great lick to practice. I like it because almost all of the notes are picked. Okay, and the reason that I like to practice that as a speed building lick— I mean, it's a technique drill too, but whenever I'm playing, you know, bluegrass tunes, bluegrass leads, stuff like that, I use quite a bit of hammer-ons and pull-offs. My picking hand is not my strongest hand. I'm actually left-handed but play right-handed. So if I can really, really practice some of these licks where almost all of the notes are picked, whenever I go to play some of the other vocabulary-based material that has a lot of hammer-ons and pull-offs, it makes it a whole lot easier. Okay, so what I like to do with this lick is I like to find my ceiling tempo, okay? And I want you to do the same thing here. But the ceiling tempo— I've mentioned this on this channel, but I think some people have misinterpreted this— it should be the fastest tempo that you could play that lick all the way through cleanly and in time. But it's one of those things where it should be, it should be a challenge. Whenever you play it at your ceiling tempo, you— it should kind of make you sweat. Maybe not literally, but you know, in internally a little bit. It— you should be able to do it, but you're pushing yourself to be able to do that. So that's a very important thing. I, I think in previous lessons I've maybe called it the floor tempo. The, the floor tempo is more like, you know, the, like, the slowest speed that you can play it at. But with this, think of it as your ceiling tempo, fastest tempo that you can play it cleanly and in time. This should be a challenge for you to be able to do this. Okay, so this is something that I've been practicing for a long time here, and I can, you know, pretty consistently play that lick at 160 beats per minute. So that'll sound like this. Okay, so then let's take the same lick, but I want to shorten it just a little bit. Okay, same lick, but I'm shortening it a little bit. So now I'm gonna kick my metronome up 10 beats per minute, and I want to play the shortened version of that lick. Okay, so I'm gonna kick it from 160 up to 170, so that's gonna sound like this. Okay, so now I'm gonna shorten that lick even more. Okay, let's do that again here. Okay, and now I'm gonna kick my metronome up even more, and I'm gonna play it at 100 180 beats per minute. And I'm just showing you that, that way you'll hear what kind of my speed building practice sounds like. I'm— yes, I'm well aware there's probably some places where I'm getting a little ahead of the metronome or a little behind it, or maybe some of the notes weren't perfectly clean. Yes, I know. but my purpose is not to show you a flawless performance. It's to show you what speed building practice should sound like—pushing yourself. Here's what we've done. I have found my ceiling tempo, the fastest tempo that I can play that full-length lick at. And again, it's a bit of a challenge. I'm having to sweat a little bit. I'm having to push myself to do it. But then what I'm doing is I'm taking a slightly smaller chunk and I'm increasing the metronome 10 beats per minute, and I'm taking another smaller chunk and I'm pushing it up another 10 beats per minute. So I'm getting used to playing parts of this stuff at 20 beats per minute faster than my ceiling tempo, which is already pushing it. Now, one other thing that I like to do, and this is not comfortable whenever you're practicing it, but I promise you it's valuable. I like to try and practice the whole lick, and then I like to try and practice a full break. At, in my case, 180, the 20 BPM that's faster than my ceiling tempo for the full-length lick. Again, this feels uncomfortable, and I'm gonna play it here for you. It's not gonna be perfect, I am gonna screw some things up, but I'm gonna play the full-length lick at 180, and I'm also gonna play a full break. I'm just playing a break that I came up with for, um, Ricky Skaggs' version of Black Eyed Susie. I mean, I'm sure if you're a fan of flatpicking guitar, you've seen Jake Workman absolutely tear this thing up. You know, you've probably seen Cody Kilby do it as well, but I'm just gonna play a break that I came up with, again at 180 beats per minute, in that full-length lick here, and that'll sound like this. Now, if you'd like to check out another lesson that I've done where I show you how to take chunks of fiddle tunes and solos that you're playing and use them to build speed, I want you to check this out right here, and I'll link to it down in the video description as well. But the idea there is I've I find my ceiling tempo, the tempo that I can play the full break or lick at. Again, it's a little bit of a challenge, but I can play it at that tempo. But then I'm deliberately increasing the tempo above my ceiling tempo, 10 beats per minute for the first chunk and another 10 beats per minute for the second chunk. And I'm also spending a little time each day playing either the full lick or a full break 20 beats per minute faster than my ceiling tempo. Do you see how if you practice this every single day you're going to build speed? Do you see how this is going to help you build speed way more than just start slow, gradually increase the tempo on the metronome, play Salt Creek every day at 75 beats per minute, and maybe if you're a good little boy, next month you can inch it up to 80. Not that that's bad advice, but it's practicing playing clean and in time, which we want to do, but it's not practicing building speed. This is practicing building speed. So I've taught this to students before and they're like, Aaron, love that lick, how the hell do I use this in a song? Well, I got you covered here. So what we're gonna do is we're going to apply that speed building lick, we're gonna put this in a classic bluegrass tune. We're gonna put this in Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms. This is an old Flatt and Scruggs classic here, and I'm gonna play this at a pretty fast tempo but not nearly as fast as I was kind of maxing out at. So I'm gonna play this at 150 beats per minute, and that's gonna sound like this. All right, so let's jump in and learn this break here. So we're gonna do 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and So we're just taking that speed building break, and I am changing up the end ending just a bit. Okay, whereas on just the straight speed building lick we did, we're going to change up that ending just a little bit to make make it fit into the tune. Okay, and the rest of those passages are pretty easy passages to play at a fast tempo. We'll come up here, uh, That's a great musical application of that speed building lick. One more time, let's hear that up to tempo. This is at 150 beats per minute. Okay, so let's do just a quick review here. So I've shown you what I like to warm up with, those little stretches to get the blood flowing in my left hand. I've shown you the picking exercises that I like to practice, again, to start to oil the machinery of my picking hands. And again, remember, down in the video description I've got linked these lessons right here where I go into much more detail on those picking exercises. And then from there, I showed you how I like to push myself to play at fast tempo. Then we took the speed building lick and we put it into a classic bluegrass tune here. So I want you to take this and apply it to wherever you are, whether you want to use this speed building lick that I've shown you in this lesson, whether you want to use some chunks of some fiddle tunes. But what you want to do is you do want to find your ceiling tempo. Again, it's the fastest tempo that you can play— again, a lick, a tune, a solo— but you can play it cleanly and in time, but you're having to push yourself to do it. And then from there you want to increase, again, either your metronome or drum track, ideally up to 20 to 30 beats per minute faster than your ceiling tempo. Now I like to use chunks because it helps you dip your toes in the water. It helps those faster tempos to not become quite as scary. But then a few times a day, I want you to take the full, again, lick, solo, tune, and I want you to play it 20 to 30 beats per minute faster than your ceiling tempo. Magic happens, and this is the part that nobody likes to hear, but the magic happens with doing this stuff consistently and sticking with it over time. I promise you, you will build speed with this stuff. So you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. I want to thank you so much for hanging out today. Again, this is just something that I've been practicing for a long time. It's worked for me, it's worked for a lot of my students, and I really think that it'll work for you as well. Remember, you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. I want to thank you so much for hanging out, and I'll see you next time.