Where Do Bluegrass Licks Actually Go?

Today I'm gonna be showing you 7 of my very favorite bluegrass guitar licks, and I'm gonna show you how to use all of them inside of the bluegrass standard How Mountain Girls Can Love. So one of the biggest mistakes I see bluegrass guitar players making is collecting a bunch of licks without knowing how to use them. They'll learn a whole bunch of hot licks from certain teachers, but when it comes time to actually solo in a tune, they fall short on the application of those licks. In today's lesson, I'm going to share with you one of my very favorite bluegrass standards for trying out new licks. It has a little 2-bar section in it that is perfect for trying out new licks and phrases while staying true to the tune. And if you can get down what I'm going to be showing you in today's lesson, you will start to see these little places, these little 2-bar places in dozens of other bluegrass tunes. You can get the tabs for all 7 of these licks down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. So I'd say a lot of y'all watching this already know this tune. This is a bluegrass jam classic. It's an old Stanley Brothers classic, and you know, a bunch of other people have recorded it since then. But just in case you don't, um, let me just run through a verse of it here real quick, because when we solo on this tune, it's almost always on the verse. Okay, so real quick, just a little verse to How Mountain Girls Can Love. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Riding in the night in the high cold wind On the trail of the old lonesome pine. Thinking of you, feeling so blue, wondering why I left you behind.

Okay, and then the chorus.

Get down, boys, go back home, back to the girl you love. Dreamer right, never wrong, how mountain girls can love.

Okay, again, we almost always solo over the verse to this here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to keep this solo melodic without being simplistic. Then we're going to designate 2 bars in this where we're going to insert some licks. The way I'm going to play the first half of this solo is going to be like this: 1, 2, 3. Okay, and what that is, it's melodic without being simplistic. Remember, riding the night in the high cold wind on the trail of the old lonesome Again, I'm hitting all of the melody notes, but I'm playing around them in key places to fill up space. It's not a simplistic melody like this.

It's not—

okay, it's melodic without being simplistic. But then after that, on bars 5 and 6, we're gonna leave that open and we're gonna leave that as a space to insert a couple of licks.

Or—

okay, so you get the idea there. But then after that 2 bars, that's bars 5 and 6, then we go back to the melody. Okay, so again, keeping most of the solo, uh, 6 bars of the 8 bars, pretty melodic without being simplistic. But then we've got 2 bars on bars 5 and 6 where we can insert some of our licks here. Okay, and I think all of that together, where most of the solo again is melodic without being simplistic, and then just 2 bars of a lick, a little bit of flash, a little bit of spice, I think that makes for a great bluegrass guitar solo. Okay, so that's the structure of what we're going to be doing today. Let's go ahead and go into lick 1 here. All right, so let's kick it off with a Billy Strings classic here. I love this phrase. I actually got this phrase a couple of months ago. I did a lesson on this channel to his solo to the tune Red Daisy, and he plays this lick, um, in that tune. So let me slow it down here for you.

Okay, again.

So that's mostly picked notes, um, with a couple of hammer-ons and pull-offs coming mostly out of our G major blues scale. He uses a— uses that little dominant 7 in there. But it's just a beautiful kind of Doc Watson-inspired Billy phrase. He uses ideas like this all of the time. And that takes up, um, about 2 bars. And there's a lot of places in the bluegrass repertoire that we can use these in. But for today, we're just plugging this into How Mountain Girls Can Love. So now let's hear that lick in the context of How Mountain Girls Can Love. I had to throw in this classic Brian Sutton phrase here for you. Let me play it slow and it's— Okay, we'll do that again. Okay, and so what really gives this a Brian feel is this. Okay, so there ends up being like a little 16th note triplet in there, right here. Now the good news is there we do a picked note, a hammer-on, and then another picked note, so we're not having to pick pick all of that and then— okay, so on the one hand it's a little bit easier than having to pick everything. Um, on the other hand, um, it's deceptively challenging because in order for that lick to kind of ring out in the way that you want it to, your left hand has to really be on point there. So again, this phrase one more time. Okay, so same deal here. We don't want to just have a great sounding lick. That's a, that's a good thing to have, but we want to apply this. So let's hear that lick in the context of How Mountain Girls Can Love. This lick is a bit of a beast. This comes from the mighty Kenny Smith, and he records the tune Bill Cheatham on his first solo record called Studebaker. And on the second break to that, he starts it off with this little lick here. Okay, and so we're going to add just a little bit more to that to help this fit the tune. Okay, one more time here. Okay, and so what that is, he's kind of outlining this, if you will, like E minor 7 flat 5, which is just perfect because it wants to resolve to this G major. And what he's doing with each of those, doing open 4th to the 7th of the 5th, open 3rd to the 8th of the 4th, open 2nd to the 7th of the 3rd, open 1st to the 8th 8th of the 2nd. And yes, that takes a lot of practice. Okay, same deal as the other phrases here. Let's hear that in the context of How Mountain Girls Can Love. This is a phrase that Tony Rice used all of the time. He used it in several different places. You can hear it at the beginning of Old Train. He uses it in the solo to Age. Uh, he uses it in How Mountain Girls Can Love. He uses kind of a version of it in Your Love Is Like a Flower. This is just a classic Tony lick, so let me slow it down here for you, and we're gonna do— okay, one more time here. Okay, so this lick is like the ultimate pinky workout. Uh, he not only starts off with this phrase, which, you know, you're using your pinky a lot with, but then to make it worse, he goes through and basically does this like pinky bar chord. All right, and then So I was, I was showing this to somebody on my last Flat Picking Path Challenge, and, uh, you know, they said they were kind of having, um, a tough time getting their pinky on their left hand, um, in shape to get it to do what it needs to do. Well, this lick is perfect for that. Okay, so one more time, nice and slow here. Okay, so there we go. So now, as we did with the other phrases, let's hear that in the context of How Mountain Girls Can Love. Absolutely one of my all-time favorite floating licks. My teacher Dave Yates showed this to me, um, gosh, a long time ago, probably well over 20 years ago. And it's just a beautiful kind of floating style lick that makes deliberate use of open strings. Just a beautiful little floating style lick. I'll do it slow here for you. Okay, one more time. I have shared this one on some other lessons that I've done on this channel, you know, showing you some floating licks here. But what's cool about this phrase is if I didn't play it using open strings, this phrase would sound like this, which is not a bad-sounding little phrase, but it just does not have the resonance that this one does. Just a beautiful little floating lick that takes up about 2 bars here, and it's perfect for trying it out in How Mountain Girls Can Love. So let's hear how that sounds. Hands down one of my favorite bluegrass phrases ever. I got this one from David Greer. He plays it on the tune Big Dirt Clod from the Lone Soldier album, which was just one of my favorite albums to listen to when I was first getting into this style. I couldn't comprehend, you know, 80% of what he was doing, but there were a couple of phrases I was able to get out of that, and this was one of them there. And just— I'll play it nice and slow here.

Let's do that again.

I just love the way you get this beautiful little position shift in there. It takes you from the open string up to the 8th fret and back down again, but it's just full of those beautiful little tasteful slides that David does so amazingly well. So again, Again, let's hear this phrase in the context of How Mountain Girls Can Love. So there was no way I was going to be able to do 7 of my favorite licks without doing at least 2 Tony Rice licks. So, um, you know, this comes straight from Nine Pound Hammer from the Manzanita album. On that solo, he keeps going here. But we're going to shorten it just a little bit to help it fit in the context of how Mountain Girls Can Love. But again, play that again. So all minor blues scale there, you know, and he would do variations on that sometimes too. He'd do like You know, but that's the idea there. All right, so let's hear that in the context of How Mountain Girls Can Love. Okay, 7 of my very favorite bluegrass licks and phrases by a handful of different pickers, all plugged in to bars 5 and 6 on the verse part of How Mountain Girls Can Love. And again, if we keep the solo mostly, you know, melodic without being simplistic, but then we have 2 bars where we insert a phrase right there, I think that makes for a great bluegrass guitar solo. So I love making these kinds of lessons because we're not just talking about getting some great licks and phrases, which I love learning licks I love stealing licks. I love teaching licks. But more importantly than that is the application of those licks. And I love talking about pattern recognition. Love talking about how you can apply these licks and phrases to classic bluegrass tunes. Again, I hope this lesson gives you some great licks and phrases to try out. But more importantly than that, I hope it gets your creative juices flowing and you can start to see how you can apply these licks and phrases to so many of the classic bluegrass tunes. As always, I want to thank you for hanging out, and I will see you next time.