These Brad Paisley Style Country Licks Are Easier Than You Think

Aaron Jaxon coming to you today here, and I want to welcome you to a little, a little chicken picking lesson here that I'm really excited to share with you. So these ideas, you know, I'm just calling them, you know, Brad Paisley style country chicken picking, little single note ideas here. And so this is— this lesson is not meant to be like an in-depth analysis of Brad's style. And I'm not even going to be doing any note-for-note solos that he does here, but you will hear him use these type of ideas a lot, and they're just really cool. They're fun to play, and if you use them, um, you know, using a lot of pull-offs and using the hybrid picking technique, I think you'll find that these ideas are actually fairly easy to play fast. So let's jump into the lesson here. So I've got 5 licks that I want to show you. I've got 3 of them out of G and 2 of them out of A. So this first one here, let me go through and I'm gonna play it real slow here. So we'll do Okay, one more time. Okay, so let's, let's, let's talk technique here, and I want to go through and slow this down even more here.

So at the beginning, we're going to do—

so that's 3rd fret on the 2nd string. Second fret on the second string, uh, second string open. And we're gonna do— so that's down, up, pull off, down, up, pull off. And then from there, we're gonna come over here and hit this third fret of the third string with our pick, and then we're gonna come and hit the second string open with your middle finger. So let's stop right there before we go on. We're gonna do So that's, uh, pick, pick, pull off, pick, and then middle finger on the second string. Okay, so that's the first little chunk of that. Um, and then from there we're gonna do— that's third fret on the third string, second fret on the third string, and then we'll pull off to the third string open.

So we've got Got it.

Okay, and then on those last 3 notes there, as far as your— what you're doing with the pick, we'll do down, up, pull off. Okay, so one more time, and we're going to Okay, let's keep going with the rest of this lick here. From there, 3rd fret of the 4th string, we're gonna hit that with the pick, and then 2nd fret of the 3rd string with your middle finger, pull off to the 3rd string, back to the 3rd fret of the 4th with your pick, 3rd string open with your middle finger, and then we're gonna do 3rd fret on the 4th with a down, 2nd fret of the 4th with an up, and then we'll pull off to the open 4th string. Okay, so, so let's take it from the beginning of that lick again here and go through it.

So we'll do—

okay. So in addition to getting the right notes over here on your left hand, you want to make sure that on your picking hand you're using the right technique there. Because using your middle finger for that little hybrid picking technique is really important because it gives, it gives these lead lines that little pop, you know, that we hear a lot in chicken picking. Okay. Again, all right, and then we've just got one more little passage here, and we're going to do— and we're basically repeating what we did on the 4th and 3rd strings, but this time on the 5th and 4th, and we're doing Okay, so let's go through that again here, and we're going to do— okay, so when you kind of speed that up a little bit, it just— it It gives you a very kind of Brad Paisley sounding country chicken picking lead line there. Okay, so that's one of the examples here. Let's do a few more. So this next one we're gonna do— okay, so the, the technique is similar to the previous line that we did here, but where— that's how we'll start this one off with, which is almost like a Tony Rice in this, you know. But, and then as far as the technique on that, so we'll pick those first 2 notes, we'll do down, up, pull-off, and then we'll pick this 3rd fret of the 2nd string, we'll come back and hit the 1st fret of the first string, and you'll hit that with your middle finger.

And then we'll do—

and then so those last 3, it's kind of like the first 3. We'll do pick, pick, pull off. And then we're gonna do Okay, okay, so the same type of idea. We're doing a lot of where we're using, um, we're using the pick and our middle finger, and we're also incorporating, um, a lot of these open strings, and we're using a lot of pull-offs. And when you combine all that stuff together, you get these cool sounding Brad Paisley style, you know. I think the most obvious example out of this is like the Nervous Breakdown, you know, uh, you know, something along those lines. I'm not playing that perfectly there, but, um, that's what's really cool about these types of lead lines here. Also too, I forgot to mention at the beginning of the video, um, if you want to get the tabs for these, I've got a link down in the video description. Just, uh, hit that link and I'll send you the tabs for each one of these examples. All right, so there's 2 ideas there. Let's do a third, and this one's going to kind of come right out of our—

but we're going to go through and just incorporate some open strings in that.

And it's going to go like this.

We're going to do—

all right, so that's going to start up here on the 6th fret of the 2nd string. We're going to pick that again like we've been doing with the other ideas. We'll pick, pick, pull off, down, up, pull off. And then we'll hit this 5th fret of the 3rd string with our pick, 2nd string open with our middle finger, pick, pick, pull off.

And then we'll—

so kind of the end of that. Very similar to— it's that same technique. So we're doing— we're picking like the 4th string, um, 3rd fret of the 3rd string with your middle finger to a pull-off.

4th, 3rd with the middle, pick, pick, pull-off.

Okay. And then we're taking that— but I hope you're seeing how when you combine the use of the pick and finger technique with a couple of pick notes and some pull-offs, it's actually fairly easy to play these licks really fast. It'd be a lot harder if I tried to flatpick all of that. So one more time with this third lick in G. Okay, so now remember, remember this passage because for our next two ideas in A We're essentially going to take that and just move it around to some different places. So now we're going to go over to A, and we are going to do really that same idea but kind of out of our, like, A major pentatonic. Okay, and it's going to go like this. We'll do Okay, so we're ending that one a little bit differently than we ended the first one there. We're doing— okay, but the ideas are the same. We're pick, pick, pull off, pick, middle finger, pick, pick, pull off, and then we're just kind of taking that passage down the rest of that scale.

So one more time there. Okay.

And then we've got one more to do. And, um, this one's kind of come more out of our A minor pentatonic shape, our And this one is essentially, um, it's going to be basically the same as that third one we did in G down here. The— we're just going to move it up 2 frets and do it out of A.

Okay, exact same technique.

Technique: pick, pick, pull off, pick, middle finger, pick, pick, pull off. Okay, so let's go through all 5 of these one more time.

So down in G, we'll do— then we'll do Still in G, and then we'll go to A.

We'll do this kind of out of our A major pentatonic, and then we'll move it up here to do it out of our A minor pentatonic. Okay, so I like these a lot because again, if you'll combine the, um, the, the pull-offs, the pick and finger technique, and these little ideas that make deliberate use of these open strings, you get some really cool sounding single note lead lines, um, kind of in the style of Brad Paisley. But there's a lot of players that use these ideas. You'll hear someone like Johnny Hyland use these a lot. I think you'll sometimes hear Brent Mason use them, and you'll even hear, uh, like Tommy Emmanuel, you know, you hear him doing like, uh, you know He does that when he's doing his Beatles melody— or medley, excuse me. So you'll hear a lot of different players use these kinds of ideas, but they're really cool, they're fun to play. And, and like I said, if you combine these, like, these pull-offs with the picking finger technique, they're not that hard to play fast. So one more time, Um, let me, uh, I'll do the performance video again here where you can hear how these sound with a drum track. So I know I've said this a lot on this channel, but, but I really do recommend practicing a lot of these ideas with a train beat backing track, especially these kinds of ideas, because a lot of times these are played as like 16th notes at pretty fast tempos. But you can find train beat backing tracks all over YouTube at pretty much any tempo that you want. So that's a great thing to practice along with. I like practicing along with that way more than a metronome just because it's easier to stay in time with a drum beat like that, and it's more fun to practice with. So anyway, I've been wanting to do a lesson like this for a while. I hope you enjoy playing these ideas as much as I do. Again, hit the link down below if you'd like me to send you the tabs for this lesson, and I will see you next time.