The History of Bluegrass Picking

Series Summary

The guitar has been around for nearly 5,000 years, developed from even more ancient instruments akin to the sitar, it has been inspiring audiences since its first chord was strummed. It is the primary instrument involved in many genres of music including country, blues, flamenco, rock, and pop, and has been celebrated as one of the most expressive instruments in the world. Whether blending acoustic harmonies on a classical guitar or shredding solos on an electric, the importance of the guitar to 20th century music cannot be ignored.

In the free video series our expert Reno McCormick will give you lessons, tips, and advice on what to look for in a guitar, how to use a capo, principles of rhythm guitar, and how to flatpick bluegrass. He will also show you a bit about Beaumont Rag and double stops, along with some tips and advice for tuning the guitar. So grab your axe and get ready to flatpick your way to stardom.

Video Transcript

"Hi. On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Reno at Reno's Music Shop in Camp Verde, Arizona, and I'm going to tell you about flatpicking guitar. Well, for flatpicking guitar we can blame Doc Watson for. He was, he's a blind guitar player, he's probably in his 70s or 80s now and he was a fiddle player and he liked to play the fiddle melodies on the guitar, so he learned to use his pick and pick out the single notes. And he was very good at it, very fast, very clean. That's a Doc Watson signature is cleanliness. You always knew it was Doc Watson when you heard, when you hear, he's still alive, but he's slowed down a little bit but he's still faster than most people and that's the beginning of flatpicking. Goes to Tony Rice, goes, there's so many of them now that you can't even name them all. It's a, flatpicking is a bluegrass innovation. We want to be able to play with the fiddles and the banjos and the mandolins. So we, first off, we're going to use the biggest pick we can hold that doesn't slow us down too much. At least a one millimeter, if not a one and a half millimeter pick. That gives us excellent tone and the pick isn't spending half its time trying to catch up to our hand, which is going to be flying down these strings."