Hot Licks for Bluegrass Guitar

Bluegrass lead-guitar—flatpicking—is an acoustic guitar style based on the linear runs of fiddle music. It emerged less than three decades ago in the wake of the discovery that the guitar (long regarded as solely a rhythm instrument) was peculiarly suited to play fiddle lines. While flatpicking has developed impressively in the years since, so that it today includes many uniquely guitar-based sounds and techniques, it will nonetheless always remain a product of the great fiddling heritage on which it was founded. So we begin with a flatpicked fiddle-tune to help introduce these preliminaries.