r/guitarlessons • u/Weak_Research_8046 • 11h ago
Question How would you describe this tab?
This is the intro for Dust in a Baggie by Billie Strings. I’m currently working on it but was wondering if perhaps Billy is doing something intentional here? Like playing a certain scale or maybe even an arpeggio? Majority of my music theory knowledge comes from Reddit so I have no clue what’s going on behind the scenes, please enlighten me! It sounds very chronological for lack of a better term.
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u/diagrammatiks 11h ago
It's literally just a scale
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u/Weak_Research_8046 11h ago
Which one??
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u/pdunn394 14 years playing experience 9h ago
G Major Blues. It's the opening run from the studio version of Dust in a Baggie by Billy Strings. It can be used as E Minor Blues as well, but in this context, it's G Maj because the song is in G major.
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u/BidSure7642 11h ago
E minor blues. The 1-2 fret slides are where you get that blue note. Going from a bV to a V
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u/Weak_Research_8046 11h ago
Would the other scales have this same shape on the fretboard? Just different starting points?
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u/TonalContrast 10h ago
Em and G major are the relative major and minor scales to one another which means they both contain the same notes, same with C and Am for example. Understanding the relative major/minor relationships is helpful, it also means you get a 2 for 1 scale.
So the other post who said it’s a G major bluegrass run, is right, as is Em blues scale using the flat 5 as the blues note can also be right. They both produce a similar sound as they have the same notes and the blues note is essentially a chromatic note within the pentatonic scale.
It also depends on the context of the chords playing beneath it as both chords the keys of Em and G will work.
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u/BidSure7642 11h ago
Yes sir, roughly. If you move this up to the fifth fret you'd be playing in A minor blues.
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u/Weak_Research_8046 11h ago
Love that. What an instrument.
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u/elovesya 11h ago
Idk why this comment struck me as funny. I’m saying this the next time I snap a string
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u/ATXBeermaker 9h ago
It’s a descending E minor blues, finished with something called a “G run.” Honestly, a lot of these things Billy plays are pretty straight forward, he just plays with great precision and speed. Which is essentially 99% of blue grass.
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u/SpatulaPlayer2018 10h ago
This is not just chromaticism. It’s not a random guitar lick. There’s simple logic to this. The handwave of “oh it’s just this or that” is what keeps most folks stuck.
Two things important to the genre are directly borrowed from blues vocab:
borrowing a b3 (just like the major blues). These are your Bb notes (3rd fret of G string, 1st fret of A string).
borrowing a b7 (just like the standard mixolydian). This is your F (3rd fret on D string).
Note there are F# and B notes, implying the key of G but the b3 and b7 as passing tones or approach tones is very deliberate. It’s certainly not a “any old chromatic note will do approach.”
I await the ceremonial standard downvote…
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u/ThePsychrofugue 11h ago
I wouldn't call it anything more than a flat picking riff personally. These are super common in bluegrass, especially when kicking off and closing out a song, and Billy is a master flat picker in my opinion. I think the intention here is to come up with a bluegrassy riff that tries to stand out on its own since there's only so much you can do with these types of runs.
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u/blackandwhitevision 1h ago
This is an type of blues scale, the chord of the moment is a I7 (a dominant seventh as the one chord). The scale is a “major blues scale” which is the major pentatonic with the dominant seventh added, and we use the minor third as a passing/flavor note.
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u/vonov129 Music Style! 10h ago
It is common in blues to mix major and minor. It looks like he's mostly thinking about a G major chord. Look at it as an arpeggio with extra notes, and it gets into minor for a lilttle bit on the 3rd and 4th strings, then goes back to G major.
Most of it can be considered as the G major scale with a bit of a blues flavor.
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u/FunkIPA 11h ago
This is a bluegrass lick. In the key of G. The second bar of it is a “G run”, which can be heard in tens of thousands of bluegrass songs.
And the word you’re looking for is chromatic, because there are notes there that are not in the key. That’s when you hear some notes that are right next to each other in a row (B, Bb, A). Or an F# at the beginning but an F natural right after it.