Over the last couple of months we’ve released a series of guitar lessons by David Ellis that cover basic bluegrass lead playing. You can now buy those six lessons with one click as the Easy Flatpicking Songs Package and save $5.99 over the standard price. The lessons will teach you beginning to intermediate level breaks for Wildwood Flower, Old Joe Clark, John Hardy, Way Downtown, Cripple Creek, Shady Grove, 9lb Hammer, Salt Creek, and Red Haired Boy. These are twelve songs that are commonly played at bluegrass jams and would be known by most of your fellow pickers. Watch the demo below or check out the lesson page to get an idea for the difficulty level and style. If you are looking for something a little more advanced you should check out our Flapticking Guitar Songs book download which features some great tabs. In the more general songbook style we also have the Bluegrass Fakebook
A few weeks ago we talked about the inevitable moment in a guitar player’s life, where they get bored of playing the same old progression. One trick to spice things up is using bass lines to connect different chords. This technique adds a bit of melody to the chord progression. Another trick covered in Peter’s newest lesson, is to incorporate hammer ons and pull off with chords. By hammering on to a specific note in the chord you can create an additional bit of tone. It can add a changing note and a bit of volume to the middle of successive strums on the same chord. You can also use it to accentuate the switching of chords. Take a look at the demo to get a better for feel for this and also head over to the lesson page for more details.
As a beginning guitarist you slowly learn tricks to spice up even the most common chord progression. Sometimes that’s using diverse strum patterns, hammering on to the chord notes, or using color chords. Another method is to use a series of bass notes to tie the two chords together. Starting with the chord you’re strumming you would often play the notes of a scale up to the root note of the next chord. This can make the common switching of G-C, C-D, D-G,etc. more interesting. This technique can also be referred to as walking up to and walking down to a chord. It provides a bit of melody and variety to a strum pattern. This is a common technique in rock ballads and country. Bass note walks along with bass strums are the backbone of bluegrass rhythm playing. In Beginner Lesson 15: Chord with Bass Lines Peter Vogl will show you 10 different bass lines that will help you switch between common guitar chords. This will prepare you to play many famous songs or help you create your own progressions. Check out the demo below or the lesson page for more details.
David Ellis has two new guitar lessons that will teach you an intermediate version of the old fiddle tune Black Mountain Rag. The lessons cover the flatpicking solo style of Doc Watson that has influenced just about every picker that’s come along since. David will teach you the solo measure by measure and then demonstrate at slow, medium, and fast speeds. The download includes Quicktime videos, .pdfs of the tablature, and metronome click tracks. Check out the lesson page for more details or watch the demos below. I’ve also includes a video of Doc playing the song in 1983.
Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Doc Watson with some background info and discussion.
Orville Gibson single-handedly invented the archtop guitar in the 1890s, working in his back-room shop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, patterning it on existing archtop instruments such as the cello, mandocello, and violin. Several makers of flat-top guitars were already working in the U.S.—C.F. Martin and Washburn perhaps most notable among them—but these instruments were poor relations to the more popular mandolins, violins, and banjos, which retained their top-dog status through the first quarter of the following century. Throughout the 1930s, however, guitars were replacing banjos as a preferred rhythm instrument on the bandstand, thanks in part to Gibson’s development of pivotal models such as the Lloyd Loar-designed L-5 in 1922 and the massive Super 400 in 1934 (the latter’s 18″-wide body helping to further assault the tenor banjo in the volume wars). By this time, Gibson also faced significant rivals from the likes of Epiphone and Gretsch, which were soon to be joined by D’Angelico and, later, Guild, while companies such as Harmony and Kay dominated the lower end of the market.
Check out the article to learn more about these underrated guitars. Below is a video of David Rawlings rocking out on an archtop acoustic. He’s one of the very few guys around who still uses it as his main guitar. He plays an intro right off the bat, fill parts throughout the whole song, and a killer solos at the 1:10 and 1:48
