? ? ? ? ? ? Well, hi. I'm Happy Trowm. Welcome to Bluegrass and Country Guitar. Now, I'm going to assume that you've never played this style before. This is your first time with a flat pick, and we're going to get into lots of fun things with it. We're going to be playing some songs, some instrumentals, some licks, all the things that you'll need to really get started playing in this style. This style is a lot of fun, and lots and lots of people have used this. I mean, almost all the country artists, the bluegrass artists all play in this style. We're going way back to Jimmy Rogers and Woody Guthrie and all these guys. It's really a fun style to play. Now, the one thing you have to learn is how to use this little piece of plastic, this little triangular thing here called a flat pick. And that's going to be the thing we're going to have to concentrate on first. And let me just show you, before we go any further, how I hold the flat pick. And I use kind of a medium size. They come in all different shapes and sizes, by the way, but I like this triangular kind. Medium looks a little like a tortoiseshell. The color doesn't matter. I use a medium flexibility. You can get very thin picks. You can get very thick ones. I just like a medium pick. Now, what I do is loosely, relaxedly hold my hand in a curled position, kind of a natural position like this, and just lay the flat pick right alongside your finger, just below the first knuckle, so that it's pointing out perpendicular to the nail. And then, letting it stick out just a little bit, just lay your thumb lightly on top of it so that your finger's curled around, and it looks something like that. Okay, now some people will hold, have more of the point showing. Some people will have less showing, like this. Some people might hold it more on the edge of the finger. I know Dan Crary kind of holds his pick this way. However you do it, whatever's most comfortable for you is the right way. I'll show you the way I do it. Curling your finger around, letting maybe a quarter of an inch of the pick show, and then bring it to the guitar, and just try picking those strings. You don't want to pick too hard, and not too much of your hand moves while you're picking. If you notice, I'm just kind of moving my fingers just a little bit, putting a little pressure with my thumb actually. Now that I think about it, I see that my thumb is actually doing some of the work here. Let's try getting used to how that sounds on each of the strings. While we're at it, we may as well get in tune before we go any further. Let me give you the notes of my guitar. I've just tuned up to a guitar tuner, so I know I'm right in tune here. Getting your pick in this position as best you can, just try picking down on the sixth string, it's your low E, and try to get your guitar in tune with mine. If you need to tighten or loosen the string to get it in tune, get it right in with that. Okay, you got it? Now let's go to the fifth string, your A string. You should memorize the names of these strings, by the way. Listen to that carefully and then tune your string to mine. Here's your D string, fourth string or D. Now if you haven't used the pick before, you may be fumbling around a little bit trying to find these strings, but just take your time, try to hit it cleanly and evenly, nice tone. Okay, now the third string is a G. Got that? Remember you can always stop the tape and rewind if you don't have this quite yet. You can listen to those strings again, take as much time as you need to tune up. My second string is a B. And my first string, the highest one, is an E. Okay? Now don't grip the pick too tightly. You don't want to squeeze it real hard. You just want to hold it hard enough so that it doesn't go flying out your hand, but try to relax your hand as much as possible. The other thing you'll notice, as I'm playing, you might see that my pinky is actually resting very lightly against the face of the guitar. So I use that as a pick, I use that as a guide so that I can find how far away I am from these strings. So you might fall upon that naturally, but if you don't, don't curl your hand up and try to find them because that's going to make it harder. So just relax your hand, let it just touch very gently on the face of the guitar. Not pressed down real hard, just nice and easy. And you're going to be playing from your wrist a lot, not from your whole hand too much, unless you're actually strumming the whole guitar, all six strings. So nice and relaxed. Let's try once again picking that low sixth string, the E. Now go to your A, D, G, B, and your high E. Okay, now let's try something a little bit different here. Let's go back to the sixth string, again just with my right hand, keeping my left hand is not doing anything right now, I'm just leaving the strings open. Let's try picking down on the sixth string, and then back up again, so that you have a down and then an up. Try to get used to that, try to do it in rhythm. One, two, three, four. Now go to the A string and do the same thing. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. Go to the D and do the same thing. Two, three, four. One, two, three. How about the G? The B. And the E. Now this is your first exercise. What I want you to do is try to do that, make sure everything's clean and even, and try to speed up a little bit each time. Maybe do one, two, three, four. And try to go between each string and back down again. B, G, D, A, E. Now if you notice, I wasn't hitting any adjacent strings. I wasn't going like that. And I was keeping it all very even. I wasn't stopping between strings like that. And you want to try to get faster and faster with this. Again, try to stay very relaxed with your right hand. And you might want to try to get it like that. Now don't do it that fast right away. Start very slowly. Pay attention to your tone. Try to keep all the strokes even so that your downstrokes aren't louder or harder than your upstrokes. You don't want to go like that. You want to get very even strokes. And then you can speed up gradually until you get nice and fast. And do that several times a day before you start practicing until you get the hang of it. And then you can try going on to some other things. And I'll show you the next step now. I'm going to assume that you know your basic chords on the guitar. If you don't know at least the elementary chords, C, F, G7, D, A7, G, and so forth, then you better go back either get a book or go back to an earlier tape. I've got one called Chords and Chord Progressions, which is on the You Can Play Guitar series. Or you can pick up a chord book, whatever you need to do to learn those chords. Because although I'll show them to you to start with, I'm not going to spend much time with that. I'm going to assume you know it. But let's just take a look at some of the basic chords here. You're going to have to know your C chord, for instance. OK. Your F. Or your F this way, perhaps. Or with the thumb over the top. I don't know if you know that one. G7. Your C again. How about D? D7. G. A7. A. Or some people play an A this way. E. E7. All of these chords, B7. And back to C again. Now that's not in any particular order. I was just sort of thinking of chords off the top of my head that you might need to know. If you don't know those kinds of chords, those basic first position chords, then as I said before, get a book or get another tape and try practicing them. But you're going to need them to start this flat picking in the country in bluegrass style. OK. Before we start getting into some songs, I think it's important that you learn the notes of the guitar. Because this is going to come in very handy as we start doing instrumentals and bass runs and lots of other things that fall into the category of country in bluegrass guitar. So let's just quickly go over the basic notes of the guitar. And you might have to take a little time to memorize these and practice them a little bit. But believe me, it'll be well worth it. Now your sixth string, the low bass note, as you know, is an E. If you play that note at the first fret, use your first finger for this. That's an F note. If you play that at the third fret, it's a G. Now right away you have E, F, G. Three notes of the C scale, but you're starting on E. Now we skip to the fifth string. And again, it may take you a little while to get familiar using your pick to really find those notes cleanly. So try picking that fifth string A. Now if you go to the second fret on the A string, there's a B. And your third fret is a C. And use your third finger for that. So once again, starting from the sixth string, we've got E, F, G, A, B, C. Now let's continue up to the fourth string, which is a D. Fourth string second fret, which is an E. And use your second finger for this. F is at the third fret. And G is your open third string. Okay, now starting on C. And by the way, if you're observant, you'll notice that I'm using my third finger for the third fret, second finger for the second fret, and first finger for the first fret. And that's a good rule of thumb. Well, not rule of thumb, rule of fingers to get into just for starting out. This may change later on, but for now it's a good way to think about the guitar. So let's do that. Let's start with the C, which is your third fret at the fifth string. Go up to D, open fourth string. E, F, G, which is your open third string. A, which is the third string second fret. Use your second finger. Now if you notice, I've got my first finger here lightly touching, or my second finger rather, lightly touching the first string. And that's kind of giving me a sense of where that string is so I can find it with my pick. Okay, second string open. Second string first fret is a C. Let's go from C to C, starting with fifth string third fret. C, D, E, F, open G, A, open B, C. And let's continue up to a D, which is the third fret on the second string. E, which is your open first string. F, first fret of the first string. D, which is your third fret. And we'll stop there. Now here are all those notes from the sixth string to the first string. I'm going to do it very slowly. Try to follow along. If you need to stop the tape at this point, practice on your own. Try saying these notes out loud so you really get familiar with where they are on the fingerboard of the guitar. Here we go, starting with E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And if you're feeling real brave, you can come back down again. G, F, E, D, C, B, A, G, F, E, D, C, B, A, G, F, E. Now let's try a little faster all the way up. Next time I won't say the notes. And back down. Now those are all notes that are in the C scale. If you notice there were no sharps or flats. We may or may not have time to get to that later, but you'll be able to figure out the sharps and flats yourself, I'm sure, as you go along. Let's get right into a basic strum, a country kind of rhythm that's been used by everybody way back in time from Jimmy Rogers and even before some of the old country stars used it. And just about everybody today uses this. It's a simple bass chord pattern. And if you start with a C chord, now you know from your experience of playing the notes that we've just done that your third finger is on a C note, and that's called the root of the chord. It's the note that has the same name as the chord. That's a C and you're on a C chord. And if you pick that C and then follow that by a strum across the strings. Now I'm only strumming across the top three or four strings. You can just practice that. You don't want to get all the strings. It sounds too sloppy. Just the top strings. And get a nice loose wrist movement. And you want to try strumming lightly across the strings, not too hard. Norman Blake says it wonderfully on his homespun video where he says it's like throwing off water. It's like drying off your hand when you have water on it. Just flicking your wrist like that. So you're going to pick the C note and then strum down across the top three strings or four strings. And the next time you're going to alternate by playing the fourth string, which is an E, as you should know. C, D, E. And don't forget you're holding your C chord down. Now again, it takes a little practice before you can hit those notes cleanly and accurately. What you've got here is your root note, the C, and then your alternate bass. In this case it's an E. Another nice alternate bass is going down to a G. And when you play the G you have to move your third finger off of the C and play that sixth string third fret. And then move it back. Or fourth string, fifth string. Some people actually play the C chord like this with the little finger playing the C and your ring finger playing the G. Okay, let's try an F chord now. Here's your F. You probably know that. You've got to get it nice and clean. Make sure those two high notes are clean. And you're going to play the root of the F chord, which is fourth string third fret. That's your F. Remember? C, D, E, F. So you play your fourth string, strum. And now you can play your fifth string third fret, which is your C note. That's your alternate bass of the F chord. And again, you could play the F like this. Or if you know your bar F, you can play it like this. So you can go fourth string, fifth string, sixth string, fifth string. Or your small F like this is okay. Now let's try a G seventh. Here I'm playing the G note, which is the root of the G chord. And the fifth string, which is your B. And then you can play the D, which is the fourth string open. These are all variations. And back to C. And again, when you do this, make sure these are all clean and even. Here I'm playing the F and the A on the third string. Okay? Nice and even. Try this with me now. C. Alternate. C. Now go to F. Go to G seventh. And go to C. Okay, let's take this a little step further. Instead of just picking down on the bass string and then strumming down, let's come back up again where we play a bass note, a down, and then an upstroke. Now you notice that the way the rhythm goes, my bass note is a quarter note, and then the two chord strokes are eighth notes. So it's counted like this. One and two and three and four and... You can think of it as boom-chicka-boom-chicka rhythm. And when you do the upstroke, if you'll notice it doesn't cover quite as many strings as the downstroke does. It's more of a... You're really hitting only maybe two strings. So it's bass down across three or four strings, and then up across maybe two or three strings at the most. So you get...it's just like a little afterthought. Nice, loose motion. And again, try to speed up a little bit. Go to F. Nice clean bass notes. Back to C. G7. C. Maybe we should try putting this to a song. Let's see. How about the old song the Carter family used to do, John Hardy? This is an old traditional song, and lends itself well to this rhythm, as do about a thousand other songs, by the way. See if you know this one. John Hardy was a desperate little man, carried two guns every day. Shot him a man on the West Virginia line. Should have seen John Hardy getting away. Now sometimes I'll just play a downstroke. Sometimes I'll go down-up. Try this. Let's do it very slow. Try it with me. You could try singing the song, too. If you can't sing and play at the same time yet, then don't worry about it. Just try playing along with me. Nice and slow. The most important thing here is getting clean bass notes, and not too loud on the strums. Nice and clean. Here we go. It goes right to F. John Hardy was a, back to C, desperate little man. Okay, to F. Carried two guns every day. C. Back to F. He shot him a man on the C West Virginia line. Should have seen G7's John Hardy getting away. Okay, now it really goes a lot faster than that, so try practicing it until you can do it about like this. Okay? I'll try to give you some more of the words in the booklet that accompanies this, so you can sing more than just one verse. There are a lot of verses to the song, by the way. Another song, let's try something in a different key. Let's go to the key of D. Now, in the key of D, you're going to play the D note as your root note, or as your first bass note. And then your alternate would be the fifth string, or the A. Again, nice and clean. Then you might go to G, and there's your G on the sixth string as your root. A7, your A, of course, is the root for A7. And you go to the sixth string open, or you can go to the fourth string as your alternate note. And back to D. How about something like this? Oh, bury me beneath the willow, under the weeping willow tree. You know the song? Then one day she'll find me sleeping behind. Perhaps she'll think of me. Well, you know, this is the kind of thing you can put to hundreds of songs. What you need to do is go through some bluegrass and country song books, and anything that's in 2-4 or 4-4 time, you can try this strum with. You can do it in any key. You can do it in G, and E, and A. As long as you know the chords, just make sure you can figure out where the root note is. And now that you know the notes on the guitar, you can easily find out that if it's an A, the root note is your A, open fifth string. D, your root note is the open fourth string, or D. E7, your root note is the low E, or the middle E here. And A. Just for fun, let's try one more little addition to this basic strum. And let's go back to C. We'll use that as our home key here. Now we've got a bass note, a downstroke, and an upstroke. So it's boom, chicka, boom, chicka, chicka. What if we try this? Bass note, an upstroke, a downstroke, and another upstroke. And now these are going to be all eighth notes, and the rhythm that you can say to yourself as you do this is bumpa, chicka, bumpa, chicka. Now this is a real swinging motion. You've got to really get that up and down feeling to your strumming. And the hardest part here is, again, getting the clean bass note. And again, you'll notice that I'm only strumming the chords over the top maybe three, four strings at the most. And the upstrokes are just over maybe two strings. So it's in slow motion. You get a nice clean bass note. And a little faster. Go to F, G7. And you can try putting that to some songs. Now you would mix these up. Sometimes you might just do bass, downstroke. Then you might throw in nice and light and easy. Now I just, before we go on, want to show you one other variation of this, as if these three weren't enough. What happens when you get a song in waltz time or three, four time? Now what you have to do is play a bass note, a down-upstroke, and then another down-upstroke. So you have bass, down-up, down-up. Remember, three, four time is one, two, three. One, two, three. Or in this case, bum-chicka-chicka, bum-chicka-chicka. F. And here you can accent that bass note even more, because the one is important on this. You can throw the upstroke in. You can go bum-bum-chicka-chicka, bum-bum-chicka-chicka-bump. Why don't we try a song in three, four time, just so you see how this all fits together? Okay, as you can see, I'm in the key of G now. Here's a bluegrass classic you might know. It goes like this. All the good times are past and gone. All the good times are old. All the good times are past and gone. Little darling, don't you weep no more. Well, I wish to the Lord I'd never been born or died when I was young. And never had seen those sparkling blue eyes or heard your flatterin' tongue. Come on with me. All the good times are past and gone. All the good times are old. All the good times are past and gone. Little darling, don't you weep no more. So there you can see how a Waltz Time song fits in with this kind of strumming. Okay, on to other things now. Let's go back to the key of C. We're going to add something called a hammer-on to this strum. This is a very simple little thing, but it really creates a nice feeling in a song, especially spices up a strum like this. And a hammer-on is very simple. It's just where you play a note open and then come down on it with your fretting finger hard enough so that it changes the pitch of the note without having to strike it again with your right hand. And try this by holding a C chord down. Lift up your second finger off of the fourth string and hammer down on that second fret. So you're going from a D to an E. Now one thing you have to be careful of is that this finger here doesn't damp that out. You have to really curl that finger around so that it keeps it very clean. There's your C. Okay? Now let's try the hammer-on and then the strum. So we play first a C note with a strum and then the hammer-on with a strum. Okay, and in rhythm it sounds like this. Three and four and one and two, three and four and... Go to F and try it there. A little harder there. G7. Try it on the fifth string. And C. Now again, you can put that into a song or into any number of songs. But let's take one that's always been a favorite of mine called Born and Raised in East Virginia. It goes like this. Born and raised in east Virginia to F, North Carolina I did go back to C to F. There I met the fairest maiden Her name and age I do not know Now you can do a little turnaround here. Go to G7 and back to C. Her hair it was a light brown color Cheeks they were like rubies red On her breast she wore white lilies Where I long to lay my head Turn around to G7. So there's something you can play with. You might not get it right away, but again, you've got all the time in the world. You can rewind the tape. Practice this until you get it. You can do the song very slowly too. You can start it out like this. Born and raised and so forth. It doesn't have to be quite up to tempo right at the beginning. So practice that. You can try hammering on other keys as well. For instance, if you want to go to D. Try hammering on the third string with your first finger. G. I'm on the fifth string with the hammer on. A7. And D. How about E? And we're on the fifth string. A. B. There I'm hammering on the first fret. C again. F. G. And it can be done in three-quarter time too, of course. And here's a neat little ending you can do. If you're playing in 4-4 time, hammer on the fourth string. Then hammer on the third string from the G to the A. And then just play your C note on the second string, first fret. So it would be like this. So let's say you were ending a song. Her name and age I do not know. Oh, that's a neat little ending. Now as you can hear, when we're playing a bass note, a hammer on, a strum, you're almost hearing a melody there. Just listen to the way this sounds. You're sort of playing a little melody. Well, it's not a very big leap from playing this kind of thing to actually playing melodies. Very often, in fact more often than not with these country and bluegrass songs, the melody notes fall right in with the chord that you're playing. You might have to make a few little adjustments here and there, but by and large most of the important notes of the song are found right in the chords. So if you watch, let's take a song like what we did John Hardy earlier. Let's do John Hardy again and look at it closely and see how we might be able to find the melody notes right in the notes we're playing when we sing it. Now once again, I'll just do a verse of it so you can hear how it goes. Remember John Hardy went, John Hardy was a desperate little man, carried two guns every day. He shot him a man on the West Virginia line, should have seen John Hardy getting away. Now watch, I'm just going to play the chords. Almost hear that melody in there. Well there it is now. If you go to F and play your third string. Now the only thing we need is that, we don't have it there, we have an A, but we need a B flat. So what I'm doing is adding my little pinky there just to get that note and then back to the C using the G note, the open G as your melody note. Watch again. F, A, B flat, A, G, and then I hammer on from the D to the E and the C. There's the melody. Listen to it again. And that just repeats. Carried two guns every day. Same thing. Shot him a man. Should have seen John. Now here we have to break up the strum a little bit because the melody notes come a little faster. So it goes down, down, G7. So that's how you take a song with a nice simple chord progression, find the melody notes and pick them out within this strum and you get an instrumental break. Let's try another Carter family song. This one is the kind of a granddaddy or grandmother, however you want to call it, of country flat pick songs. It's one that just about everybody who plays with a flat pick plays this song or even plays with fingers. It's a real famous song called Wildwood Flower. It was made famous by Mother Mabel Carter who played very much in this style. It sounded like this, although she did use a thumb and index finger to strum these notes. So it was more like this. But the end result sounded very similar. So we're using a flat pick now. Wildwood Flower, as you might know, goes like this. I'll sing a verse for you so you can hear how the melody and the words fit in together in the song. And then I'll show you how, just like John Hardy, the melody fits right into the chords you're playing. So here's Wildwood Flower. I will twine and I'll mingle my raven-red hair With the roses so red and the lilies so fair And the myrtle so bright with its emerald hue And the pale emanita and eyes look so blue There's the melody. That's the first verse of the song. Now watch, I'm going to play it very slowly and you can see how this works. The song, the chords go like this. So it starts on C, goes to G7, then back to C. Now I'm all the way up here on my third string. Now I have to bring this finger, the note goes to an A. So I have to bring the second finger over here to the third string second fret. I'm going to hammer back on my normal hammering position here. Now I have to add an F with my little finger and then a G7 chord. And here again I'm not hammering on the normal note with the G7 but I'm hammering on from the D to the E and back to C. Once again, very slowly here it comes. There's an F note with my little finger. G, hammer on, hammer again. G7, C. Now it goes way up. What that is is your open G, you go up to your C, which is your second string with your first finger playing the first fret. Open E, strum, E. Now my little finger comes down on the D here and then I play the C. See some of these notes you have to adjust because they don't necessarily, every note doesn't fall into the chord, just the main notes do. So the G note, now I go to F and I'm playing the A note of the F chord. C, A, G and then back to the first line. I'm going to play the whole thing again very slowly here. Now all the way up to the G. Whoops, G, C, E, D, G, A, C, A, G. Here it is up to speed. Okay. Now you might have noticed that I didn't play it exactly the same way each time and you probably shouldn't either. Try to figure out your own variations. You can hammer on sometimes, sometimes don't hammer on. Try hammering on different strings. Make up something. It's not necessary to stick to a script. You'll have some tablature to follow that'll come along with this tape, but you can vary from that tablature too. Just use it as a guideline. You'll find that no two people play any of these songs exactly the same way and you should be the same way. Just be loose with it, be easy with it and just try to get into the swing of it and you'll have a lot of fun. Well, no lesson on bluegrass or country flat picking is going to be complete without the G lick, the famous Lester flat G run that just about every bluegrass player in the world plays. So you should be no exception. You should be playing this too. It's called the G run or the G lick, but it can be played in any key. We'll learn it just for the sake of tradition in G though. It's played a lot of different ways, but I'll show you the basic notes first. If you play a G chord, start on the G, which is your sixth string. Then you play your open A, A sharp. We haven't come across a sharp yet, but there it is. First fret of the fifth string. Then your B, open D, E, G. Here it is again. Now as I said, there's a lot of different ways of playing this little run. You could hammer on the A to the A sharp to the B. So you could go like this. Then hammer on from your D to your E. And then your G. Once again, the whole thing. You can also pull off when you get to the E note. Pull off, which is the opposite of a hammer on. You just pick that string, fret it, and then pluck your finger off with your left hand. So now you'd get this. And then your G. Some people just start on the A sharp. So there are lots and lots of ways of doing this. And I guess you know that there are songs that begin or end with it. Mama don't allow no guitar playing around here. We don't care what mama don't allow, we're gonna play that guitar anyhow. Mama don't allow no guitar playing around here. Roll in my sweet baby's arms. Lay around this shack till the mail train comes back and roll in my sweet baby's arms. Now I threw in a few bass runs in there. We have a whole tape, by the way, just on bass runs. So we don't have time to get into these in any detail. But I can show you some slowed down versions of what I just did. And maybe you can pick up the bass runs on your own. That's where it would go in rolling my sweet baby's arms. Rolling my sweet baby's... Here's the G lick. Roll in my sweet baby's arms. To a D7. Now a G. Bass run. Lay around this shack till the mail train, there's one that goes to C. Mail train comes back. D7. Roll in my sweet baby's... Bass run to G. Arms. And then right into the G lick. Ain't gonna work on the railroad. Ain't gonna work on the farm. Gonna lay around this shack till the mail train comes back and roll in my sweet baby's arms. Well there's that famous G run. Master flat G lick. You can have a lot of fun with that. You can even try that in other keys. You can do that in the key of C. D. A. What else have we got? E. So it's a good idea to practice that in a lot of different keys. Well that's about all we have time for on this tape. As I said earlier, if you can play everything we've done so far, you've come a real long way in one lesson. And I certainly hope you've enjoyed it. We have lots and lots of stuff to go on to. We've got wonderful tapes by great flat pickers. Norman Blake, Steve Kaufman, Rust Barenburg, Tony Rice. The best ones in the business. So look through our catalog and you'll find lots of other things to move on to now that you've got this real solid background. Well I've had a lot of fun with this and I hope you have too. Thanks a lot. Keep picking. I'll see you next time. Bye. Thank you.