Acoustic Bluegrass Rhythm Guitar Lessons

Basic Bluegrass Strumming Pattern

Great video from Peter Vogl of  FreeGuitarVideos.com.   In this video, Peter demonstrates some popular Bluegrass Guitar Strumming Patterns, which are excellent building blocks for learning more complicated patterns.

How to play Acoustic Bluegrass Guitar -- Standard Bluegrass Progression

Here is another great lesson from the folks over at Next Level Guitar.  In this video, Marty Schwartz demonstrates how to play a standard, but very enjoyable bluegrass guitar progression.  He teaches you how to play the chords and the rhythm.

Basic Bluegrass Rhythm Guitar Lesson

In this video, guitarist and teacher Ryan Crist demonstrates how to play some basic bluegrass guitar rhythms, progressions, chords and licks.

Bluegrass Guitar Lessons

By Andre Sanchez

Typically, bluegrass lessons involve acoustic equipment: no electric at all, and no drums! Many people believe bluegrass guitar to be very complicated, but it can also be very simple. Bluegrass is what you make it.

The origins of bluegrass lie way back to the days when times were hard for most; the day of shanties and life without all today’s modern conveniences. It has a raw acoustic sound, and should be fun to play and fun to listen to. It is something to take your mind off the daily worries of life, and allow yourself just to be yourself.

Bluegrass guitar lessons will not teach you bluegrass in a week: it’s for the longer haul and those of you that want to have fun while you learn. Bluegrass involves a good strong bass rhythm, and in between each bass pick you strum. You can make use of some of the traditional guitar techniques, used a lot by solo guitarists. Techniques such as hammers ons and pull offs can spice up a bluegrass run, and allow you to play with fewer picks.

Basically a hammer on is where you play a note then switch frets quickly by hammering a finger onto another note, using the same string vibration for more than one note. A pull off is when you fret a string, play it and then pull your finger off, playing another note with the same string vibration. Judicious use of these techniques allow you to play much faster and with fewer right hand movements.

You can then play two bass notes to each pick, and all the time remember that the picks take prominence over the chords. Which takes us on to chords. In bluegrass you have to learn chords and it is useful to have a good armory chords in your arsenal. The basic guitar skills of chords and scales apply as much to learning bluegrass guitar as to any other style. Bluegrass guitar lessons will focus on picks and chords, and your picking style is also very important.

Picking forwards and backwards combine with hammer ons and pull offs to enable you to increase your playing speed. These very fast bluegrass riffs that you all admire involve all of these techniques and more. You have no time to think on every individual note or chord, and have to build a memory of what comes next. That is where a mastery of scales can help you – that continual practice might seem a waste of time, but it is all money in the bank.

Bluegrass guitar involves learning different sequences of pick and strum, and then putting them together to form a finished piece. You don’t have to think on the individual notes in each sequence, just how to fit them together so that from a few sequences you can fit them together in different ways to suit the tune.

Before you start on your lessons there is some essential equipment you will need in addition to an acoustic guitar. Your pick is important, and you will find it difficult to play bluegrass guitar with too soft a pick. The best picks are stiff and made from tortoise shells. If you can get that, your pick should be fairly thick and not bend or flex much at all.

You should also get yourself a capo: that’s one of these devices that clamps onto the neck to effectively make the strings play shorter. What a capo does is to change the key you are playing in. Basically the capo allows you to play in G, while the capo adjustment makes it sound like other keys. Since bluegrass is played generally only between G and C the capo allows you to do that by learning to play only in G.

As for the bluegrass guitar lessons themselves, it is very difficult to learn just from a book. A good bluegrass guitar teaching book with a CD would be better: the CD at least let’s you hear what you are learning should sound like. However, by far the best bet is a video or DVD. With these you can see what your teacher is demonstrating as well as hear it. You can copy the finger movements and see exactly how you should be holding your guitar and your pick. You will understand better how a capo can be used to change key without changing your fingering. However, there is an even better way.

An online membership that offers tuition in different guitar styles, with an option of teachers, is likely the best way to learn bluegrass guitar, or any guitar style for that matter. OK, you might have to pay every month, but you get fresh material with such a site, as opposed to the one-time-only DVD, and can also try out a few other guitar styles when you need a rest from the pick-strum-pick-strum sequences of bluegrass.

Try a bit of country fingerpicking style, or even some ole heavy metal! When you are practicing hard with an end in sight, it’s good to relax a bit and enjoy practicing something else for a while. You could even get some practice at the techniques you will have to learn, such as hammer ons and others.

Without a doubt, bluegrass guitar lessons will teach a different guitar style that is fun to play, and if you choose your teaching medium properly, could open your horizon to a whole host of alternative styles and techniques that can do nothing but improve your abilities as a guitar musician.

For information on an online membership site that offers top-rated and highly regarded bluegrass guitar lessons, visit http://www.jamplaynow.com where you find a site offering everything any guitar student could ask for.

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Bluegrass Guitar Scales

By Ricky Sharples

Bluegrass music is an offshoot of the country and western musical genre. As with country music, bluegrass has its foundation in the music of Ireland, Scotland and England. If bluegrass is centered on one area of the USA, it is Appalachia. The people are of Irish and Scottish descent and in their music instrumental virtuosity is not a poor relation of singing. In most forms of popular music the instruments back up the vocalist, but in bluegrass the vocals and the instruments are all just members of the team. In a bluegrass band everybody is expected to take a solo just as they do in a jazz band. The instruments associated with bluegrass music are acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle and bass.

The main thing to remember if you want to learn to play bluegrass scales is to learn some tunes. That is what music is made of. The scales are just the foundation of melodies and you need to be able to break out of the confinement of your scale as soon as possible. The other thing learning tunes is good for is developing right hand speed. As you can tell from listening to bluegrass music, speed flatpicking is essential.

If you are interested in learning bluegrass music and you would like to start by learning scales, start with the major scales in the open position. Do not bother with going up the neck of the guitar yet because learning your scales in the open position is crucial for playing bluegrass solos. Learn the scale in the key of G first, then C, D, F, A and E. Learn the keys one at a time so that you are comfortable with one before you go onto the next key. As with all musical learning, the more work you put into it at the beginning, the greater the rewards and the quicker your progress.

When you sit down each day to practice your scales, spend five or ten minutes going up and down the scale alternately. Then experiment a little. Try playing the scale by skipping some notes or playing the notes randomly. You need to become very familiar with the major scale because bluegrass solos rely on major keys. To get further into bluegrass guitar scales, find examples of the major pentatonic and the major diatonic scale.

Another basic scale that is important in bluegrass, blues, country and rock music is the minor pentatonic scale. It has five notes, should be learned in all positions on the guitar neck in all keys, and has been used for lead solos by every guitar player known to man. It is also popularly known as the blues scale. If you do not know much about modes, do an internet search to get some idea of the difference between a scale and a mode. If you have trouble understanding the theory, do not worry, just try playing.

The mixolydian mode is a good “scale” to practice on also:

E—————————————————————-0—–1—–3

B————————————————-0—–1—–3—————

G—————————————-0—-2——————————-

D————————0—–2—–3—————————————-

A——–0—–2—-3———————————————————

E–3————————————————————————–

To get more in-depth knowledge of bluegrass guitar scales, some great bluegrass guitar players to listen to are Vassar Clements, Doc Watson, Darol Anger, Clarence White, Norman Blake and Sam Bush.

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