Why Your Fretting Hand Is Just As Important As Your Picking Hand In Bluegrass (pt.3 of 3)

Today I'm going to be showing you how to optimize your fretting hand for bluegrass flatpicking lead guitar. Doing this is going to make your leads sound much cleaner, smoother, faster, and it's going to give your playing a much better tone. In this style, the picking hand gets most of the attention for good reason, because this style requires just about more out of your picking hand than almost any other style does. But we do not, and I repeat, do not want to neglect our left hand. It's extremely important, and having a strong fretting hand in bluegrass lead guitar is something that you absolutely want to strive for. This video is a part 3 around foundational bluegrass flatpicking lead guitar techniques that I've been wanting to do for a long time. And the reason is, is I get so many people coming to me wanting to learn this style, and they immediately jump in and they want to tackle Tony Rice and Billy Strings and Doc Watson and Brian Sutton solos, or they want to get a bunch of hot licks under their belt, or they want to build speed or learn how to improvise. And all of all that kind of good stuff, which is all great, but they haven't set the foundation here and they keep getting stuck. But getting this foundational stuff is going to give you just that. It's going to give you a solid foundation for which you can build and you can learn this style of guitar playing. So as is always the case with my lessons, you can get the tabs for this down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to give you 3 ideas to be thinking about, and I'm going to give you simple exercises for practicing each one of the ideas. And if you will stay till end, I'm going to show you my very favorite fretting hand exercise that I use every day to keep my left hand fingers in really good shape. Okay, so idea number 1 here: place your fretting hand fingers at the bottom of the frets and not the top. Let me say that again: place your fretting hand fingers at the bottom of the frets and not the top. So real quick, I'll just demonstrate that real quick. So let's say I'm just going to play the open 6th string, and then I'm going to play the 2nd fret and then I'm going to play the 3rd fret. Okay, so the, the top of those frets would be right here if I did my fingers like this, right here for the 2nd fret and right here for the 3rd fret. Okay, okay, so that would be the top of the fret. That is the wrong way to do it. Here is the correct way to do it. Do you hear how much cleaner and how much more full that sounds? I know it's kind of crazy because it really is such a short distance, but man, it makes a world of difference. So that— the, the kind of the bottom of the fret is the sweet spot of the fret. Now you don't want to be like on the bar. Like if I'm, if I'm playing the second fret here, I don't want to be up on the bar that starts the third fret. I don't want to be fretting that. That's not going to work. But kind of like right above it for the 2nd fret. That's the sweet spot of the fret. So one more time, this is the top of the 2nd fret, which sucks, and then this— ah, that sweet spot of the fret there. So right here, here, and here. So that's what we want to do, and you want to stay consistent with that even if you're up here on the higher frets, you know, even though the fret's a whole lot smaller and there's not nearly as much area. But still, with that top of that 10th bottom of that 10th fret. Okay, so here is a simple exercise. I've used this before in this little foundational series, but I want to use it again here. And all we're gonna do is we're gonna play each string. We're gonna do open, 1st fret, 2nd fret, 3rd fret. We can play this as 16th notes, but again, the idea there— get up to the bottom of those frets. Don't be in the top. Okay, so this exercise will just go like— we'll just do And then let's come back down. Okay, and what you want to be focusing on there is the placement of your left hand fingers. On the frets. And we want to again get to the bottom of the fret, not on the bar that starts the second fret, but kind of right above that. Just that nice full tone. We don't want this. Here, how much that sucks— I don't really know another way to phrase it. I mean, it just, it just, it sounds bad. You get a lot of fret buzz, but the, the notes just aren't nearly as full as they are up toward the bottom of the fret. So one more time here, and just keep those fretting fingers as close to the bottom of those frets as you can. Okay, so that's idea number 1 there. Again, remember, place your fretting hand fingers toward the bottom of the frets, not the top. Okay, so idea number 2: try and make your hammer-ons and pull-offs as loud and clean and full as picked notes. Let me say that again: try and make your hammer-ons and pull-offs as loud and clean and full as picked notes. So I first learned this from Brian Sutton. So I first got into this style, I think it was the early 2000s, and, uh, you know, Brian had, you know, been on the scene for a little bit. You know, he started playing in Ricky Skaggs's band in the '90s, and then by this point, you know, he had, he had gone on and, you know, he was touring with, you know, Jerry Douglas and doing some other gigs like that, but he was doing a lot of session work he'd released his first solo, or first couple of solo albums, and it was just, it just astonishing. I mean, just a lot of people had never heard anybody play like an acoustic guitar like as fast and as powerful as he was playing it. And make no mistake about it, Brian has a terrifyingly fast and clean picking hand. But, um, what I would do is I would just have to, you know, get magazine subscriptions and look up articles to try and, uh, you know, get his thoughts around some of this stuff. And, uh, one of the things he really talked about was the left hand and trying to make his hammer-ons and pull-offs and all of that kind of stuff sound as loud and clean as picked notes. So here's just a couple of little exercises I want to show you here. Let's, let's, let's start with this one here. We're going to do Okay, so that's a very simple idea right there. So we're just gonna— we're taking the open string and we're doing— playing the open string, and then on the ascension we're doing hammer-ons to the 2nd fret, and then as we come down we're doing a pull-off from the 2nd fret to the open string. Okay, now at the beginning there, Take My Breath Away, Top Gun. So you'll— if, if you weren't hearing that before, you'll definitely hear it now. But anyway, that's just a— that's just kind of a side tangent there. But what we want to do as we're going through and doing that, we want to make those hammer-ons— try to try and make it sound as clean as a picked note. Now we're not going to get there because there's just not as much physical force that's hitting the string as there would be if we were picking it. But to the extent that you can try to do that, your hammer-ons and pull-offs are going to sound really clean, really powerful. Now on the pull-offs, here's kind of like a sub-secret here. When you're doing a pull-off So my finger, when I'm doing that, is, is, is I'm pulling it off, but it's like moving like down toward the ground, okay? And not like out, like toward the wall, okay? So remember, with pull-offs, down toward the ground, not, um, kind of off of the string toward the wall. Do you hear the difference? So here's down toward the ground, and here's up toward the wall. So different. That— it's so much more powerful that way. Okay, so, and then try to do that on the other strings again, down to the ground. Okay, and that, that's going to take some practice if you're not used to doing pull-offs that way, but you can really— to kind of get a grip on that, just maybe just start with the first string. And the second string, because once we kind of start getting down here, you know, but that, that's what you want to go for. When to get those pull-offs sounding nice and loud and clean, you want to pull down toward the ground, not like off of the string toward the wall. Okay, so that's one way to do it, just open string to the second fret. Doing hammer-ons on the ascension, pull-offs on the descension. Um, just one other way to do that though here, um, you know, and obviously we could go through and do like a combination of all of our left-hand fingers here. I'm going to spare you that for right now, but what I do want to do, um, just to get, um, familiar with doing hammer-ons and pull-offs like from the unfretted notes, index finger to ring finger, let's do this. Um, Okay, so simple idea. We're just gonna hammer on from the 1st fret to the 3rd fret on the ascension, and then from the 3rd fret to the 1st fret on the descension. Okay, and again, when you're doing those pull-offs, again, try to pull that finger down toward the ground, not up, not like up toward the wall. Okay, and then when you're doing the hammer-ons there, especially now that we're working with two fretted notes, when you do the hammer-on, don't lift your pointer finger up. Don't go just because we don't need to right there. Just leave it where it is. That's going to give your playing and your hammer-ons more resonance. And then, okay, that was idea number 2 there, which is try and make your hammer-ons and pull-offs sound as loud and clean as a picked note would. Okay, let's go into idea number 3. Our idea number 3: avoid the air dancer fingers. Let me say that again. Avoid the air dancer fingers. Aaron, what the heck is an air dancer? You've all seen it if you've ever driven by your local car dealership and they've got the real big tall inflatable balloon man that's out there like doing this, like, woo, back and forth doing that. That's the air dancer. That's the tube man. That's the balloon man. And what I see with a lot of students whenever they're going through in their placement leads is their fingers are all like, like an individual air dancer, Tube Man. Their fretting hand looks like this. Okay, do you see how much unnecessary motion that is there? It's like every single one of those fingers looks like a dead gum air dancer It looks like a tube man. It looks like the balloon man in front of your local car dealership. Okay, so how do we avoid that? So I'm going to reference the first exercise that I showed you in this video where we do the open string, 1st, 2nd, 3rd frets. We do that going up, coming down. Now on, on that first idea, I was having you emphasize the placement of your fretting hand fingers. For this one, I want you to think about it like this: do not move any finger unless you absolutely have to. Okay, so on the ascension, that'll look like this. So do you see how when I get to that 3rd fret, my middle finger and ring finger are still where they were, and I only move that when I get to the next string? Okay, I'm not doing this. That results results in a very staccato choppy sound that we don't want. Just leave those fingers down until you absolutely have to move them. And, and, and when I— whenever I'm playing that, I've got my hand just kind of positioned right above it where they're all kind of ready to fall in place. Okay, now the, uh, the The descension is gonna be a little bit different because whenever we're doing that, we do have to lift up our fingers in order to make the next note sound. Okay, that second fret is not gonna sound if I go— that'll work on the ascension, it doesn't work on the descension, but you still want to minimize your finger motion. So remember, on the ascension, minimize— like, do not move any finger unless you absolutely have to. And then on the descension, we do have to move the fingers more, but again, that's what we want.

We don't want—

we don't want air dance fingers, balloon man fingers. The master of this was Tony Rice. Um, it was, it was weird watching him to a certain extent because he would be playing these unbelievably fast, clean, and smooth ideas, but when you watched his left hand, a lot of times— sometimes it would, but a lot of times it didn't look like it was moving that much. You see how that works? You see how that works? There's no wasted motion. And that's how he sounded so smooth and so clean and so fast and had such good tone, is because he absolutely optimized his left hand to sound that way and to minimize and get rid of any unnecessary motion. So there we have it there. There's 3 fretting hand ideas and some simple exercises to accompany those. Number 1: Make sure your fretting hand fingers are at the bottom of the frets and not at the top. Number 2, try to make your hammer-ons and pull-offs sound as loud, as clean, and as full as picked notes. And then number 3, avoid the air dancer balloon man fingers because it results in a bunch of wasted motion that makes your leads sound choppy. So okay, I promised you a bonus exercise here at the end that I love and I use every single day, so I'm going to go ahead and show it to you here now. I'll show you what it is and then I'll show you how to practice it here. So okay, this idea originally comes from Steve Vai. So I'm sure you know who Steve Vai is, but in case you don't, he's probably the baddest of all the rock shredders and just has a terrifying left hand. He'll do these ideas where he'll like hold the neck of his guitar like this and then, you know, all of that kind of crazy stuff there, that kind of legato thing. But this is an exercise that I think he originally published in like Guitar Player magazine back in the '80s. And here's what we're gonna do. Put your pointer finger on the 5th fret of the 1st string, and what we're gonna do— do a hammer-on and a pull-off with your ring finger, just like that. And we want to do it continuously for, we'll say, 30 seconds. Okay, so do that for 30 seconds. Now switch to your middle finger and do that for the same amount of time. Now switch to your pinky finger up here on the 8th fret. Again, 30 seconds. Now we're going to put middle finger on the 6th fret, ring finger on the 7th. Let's do that, 30 seconds. And then come up here with your pinky finger. Oh, we are on fire! All right, and then we're going to do one more, and then put your ring finger right here and do a hammer-on and a pull-off between your ring finger and pinky. Okay. So the point of that is you want to be continuous. You don't want to do this and then stop and then do this and then stop and then do this. You want to do it continuous. Now, if 30 seconds is too much, do it for 10 seconds on each one. Now, I think Steve Vai originally recommended doing it for a minute. That's what I try to do, except when I get to like this one right here and this one, I do those for 30 seconds. So just find what works for you. But the big picture thing there is with that is that you want to do it continuously, whether that's 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds, but you want to do that continuously. And then add that to your practice routine and do that every day, and I promise you it will whip your fretting hand into shape. So I want to thank you so much for hanging out today. Again, you do not want to neglect your fretting hand when it comes to bluegrass, flatpicking, lead guitar. But doing this in combination with, you know, having a really strong picking hand is going to result in some amazing sounding bluegrass leads. Remember, you can get the tabs for this lesson down in the video description and in the top pinned comment. As always, thank you for hanging out, and I will see you next time.