Online bluegrass guitar lessons
You can learn bluegrass flatpicking online, and you have three honest options. Course libraries like ArtistWorks and TrueFire give you structured lessons from known players, and ArtistWorks lets you send Bryan Sutton a video for a reply. A local teacher, jam or camp puts other players in the room with you. A 1:1 mentor, which is how Sonora works, hears your playing regularly and builds the plan around what your right hand and your time need next.
Below: what to learn first, what players like Bryan Sutton, Billy Strings and Chris Eldridge told us about learning this music, and who teaches bluegrass at Sonora.
By Spencer Handley, founder of Sonora · Published · Updated
Three ways to learn flatpicking online
Each of these has made real bluegrass players. The right one depends on where you are and what you are missing.
Course libraries
ArtistWorks and TrueFire
- Good fit for
- Players who want a structured set of lessons from a known name and can work through them on their own.
- What it does well
- ArtistWorks has Bryan Sutton's bluegrass guitar school, and you can send him a video of your playing and get a reply through its Video Exchange. TrueFire has a large catalog of courses, including a beginner bluegrass course from Tyler Grant. Both are a good way to get the tunes and techniques in front of you.
- Where it falls short
- The lessons are the same for everyone. You decide what to practice next, and a reply to one video is not the same as someone following your playing week to week.
A local teacher, jam or camp
A flatpicking teacher in your town, a weekly bluegrass jam, or a summer music camp
- Good fit for
- Players who live near a good bluegrass scene and want to play with people in the room.
- What it does well
- Bluegrass has always been passed down one-on-one and learned at jams. Playing rhythm in a real circle teaches time and listening faster than anything on a screen.
- Where it falls short
- A great flatpicking teacher is hard to find in most towns, and camps happen a few weeks a year. A jam will show you where you are, but it will not tell you how to fix it.
A 1:1 mentor
How Sonora works: a dedicated mentor, a curriculum and live classes
- Good fit for
- Players who already know their chords and some tunes, and want a working bluegrass player to hear them and set the plan.
- What it does well
- Your mentor reviews recordings of your own playing and tells you what to change next, so the right hand, the time and the tune choices all get worked on in the order you need them.
- Where it falls short
- It costs more than a course library and asks for steady practice. If you are brand new to the guitar, start with the basics first.
What to learn first
Nashville guitarist Shaun Richardson breaks bluegrass guitar into five levels: learn the tune, bring rhythm to life, add voice and vocabulary, let other genres in, and blend it all into your own voice. For the first three, this is the order we would work in.
- Rhythm. Bluegrass guitar is a rhythm instrument first. Shaun Richardson's second level is bringing rhythm to life with walk-ups, passing tones, accents and right-hand nuance, which is where, in his words, the guitar stops being a metronome. Trey Hensley calls the right-hand bounce the barrier for anybody getting into bluegrass, and says it comes from fiddle tunes.
- The tune itself. Shaun's first level is learning the melody, the chord shapes and the form, using a tune like “Soldier's Joy.” Bryan Sutton goes further back: get the melody into your ear well enough to sing or whistle it before your fingers find it.
- G runs and bluegrass vocabulary. Level three is voice and vocabulary: G runs, C-shape language, small rhythmic pushes and the chromatic moves that keep a melody breathing. This is where your playing starts to sound like bluegrass and not like a guitarist reading it.
- Crosspicking. Crosspicking borrows the banjo roll for the guitar. Trey Hensley drills it every day across string pairs, watching that the pick hits flat and the hand stays loose. Molly Tuttle shows it on “Wildwood Flower,” adding a three-string pattern to a simple melody.
- Fiddle tunes at speed. Once the shapes and the right hand are there, fiddle tunes are where it all comes together. Robb Cappelletto's advice is to stop climbing the metronome one click at a time, and to work in free time and at near full tempo instead, so you find out early which fingerings will hold up.
Levels four and five come later: jazz harmony slipping into a fiddle tune, and playing that reacts to the band. As Shaun puts it, the goal is playing musically, and the skill underneath all of it is listening.
What working players told us
We sit down with bluegrass players on Playback, our interview series. A few lessons from those conversations, each with the full interview.
Bryan Sutton
What separates real players from the rest
Learn the melody by ear first, then use it as your map of the fretboard instead of scale shapes. His reduction exercise asks how few notes you can play and still hear “Arkansas Traveler,” then builds variations from that skeleton. And he puts rhythm and time at the center of what separates real players.
Chris Eldridge
What a train wreck taught him about mastery
During a stay at Tony Rice's house the two never played a tune. Tony told him, “You're just trying to collaborate with your fellow musicians to make sounds that are pleasing to the ear.” A live performance that fell apart taught him the same thing the hard way: playing to impress is the trap.
Billy Strings
Tony Rice's evolution, through one tune
With his Sonora mentor Robb Cappelletto, Billy traces how Tony played “Fishscale” across the years. He remembers playing Tony's own guitar and finding how lightly it had to be played to get the tone. On right-hand technique, their point is that it is personal: stay consistent, relaxed and in tune.
Robb Cappelletto
The 8% rule: how Billy Strings' mentor teaches practice
Slow a recording down as far as you need to hear it, even to 8% speed, and do not get mad at yourself. Ego is the obstacle, not ability. For your hands, he works in no tempo and near full tempo and goes back and forth, instead of creeping up a click at a time.
Trey Hensley
Rebuilding his right hand after an injury
He hurt his right hand on a 2018 tour by playing too hard, too tight and anchored on the bridge pins. He rebuilt it with daily crosspicking drills: the pick hitting flat, a straight line from forearm to hand, as little tension as possible.
Molly Tuttle
Redefining modern bluegrass guitar
Her starting fiddle tunes: “Salt Creek,” “Bill Cheatham,” “Billy in the Low Ground,” “Soldier's Joy” and “St. Anne's Reel.” She suggests learning the standard versions from Clarence White's fiddle tune albums, and transcribed Tony Rice and David Grisman with slow-down software.
Dan Tyminski
The real story behind "Man of Constant Sorrow"
He came up on banjo and never planned to be a defining guitar voice. The O Brother session was one mic and one take. What he keeps coming back to is Tony Rice, rhythm guitar and listening harder than you play.
Mountain Grass Unit
Bluegrass soloing, mash rhythm and playing without a click
Luke Black builds a fast break from short ideas: state one, repeat it, then develop it or move on, and end on a G run. Sing your lines so they breathe. Their fiddler, Josiah Nelson, studied rhythm guitar with Wyatt Rice and now calls playing rhythm for hours his favorite thing in the world.
Who teaches bluegrass at Sonora
Every Sonora mentor is a working musician. These three teach flatpicking and bluegrass guitar:
- Ross Martin
Bluegrass and acoustic guitarist with a jazz degree from the University of North Texas. Longtime guitarist in the Matt Flinner Trio, with the Jacob Jolliff Band since 2019, and an instructor at RockyGrass Academy and Steve Kaufman’s Acoustic Kamp.
- Greg Fleischut
Specializes in bluegrass flatpicking and jazz. Has toured as a sideman at Red Rocks, RockyGrass and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, works as a session guitarist in Los Angeles, and graduated from CalArts.
- Robb Cappelletto
Toronto guitarist on the York University jazz guitar faculty since 2007, teaching at Sonora since 2020. Mentor to Billy Strings. Teaches by ear and fretboard visualization instead of written materials.
How Sonora works
Sonora Guitar Intensive is an online guitar mentorship program. Students work through a structured curriculum with a dedicated mentor, a professional guitarist who gives them feedback on their playing, plus live weekly group classes and a private community.
- Core Program. For players who already play and feel stuck. It runs 3 to 12 months, and your mentor builds your path around the music you want to play, bluegrass included.
- Beginner Bootcamp. If you are new to the guitar, a 12-week program that builds the fundamentals first. From $297, or $1,497 with a mentor (see the Bootcamp).
- Live classes and community. Live weekly group classes with our mentors, plus a private community of players.
- How to start. You apply, then have a free call with a mentor about your playing and goals. Core Program tuition is quoted after that call. You can read how tuition is set first.
Questions bluegrass players ask us
Can I learn flatpicking online?
Yes. Most of what flatpicking asks of you is your ear, your right hand and your time, and you can work on all three at home with recordings. What a video cannot do is notice that your right hand is tight or your rhythm is rushing. That is why feedback on your own playing matters, from a teacher who hears it and tells you what to change.
How long until I can play fiddle tunes at speed?
There is no honest single number. It depends on where you are starting, how much you practice and which tunes you pick. What shortens it is practicing the right way: test your fingerings near full tempo early, so you do not spend months slowly speeding up a fingering that was never going to work. A mentor can hear where you are and tell you what is holding the tempo back.
Do I need a dreadnought?
No. The dreadnought is the classic bluegrass guitar because it is loud and full in the low end, which helps in a jam, but any acoustic in good playing condition is enough to learn on. The setup matters more than the body shape. Billy Strings found that Tony Rice’s own guitar had low action and gave its best tone to a light touch. Your mentor can tell you if an upgrade would help.
Is Sonora only for bluegrass?
No. Sonora teaches guitar in many styles, including jazz, blues, rock, funk and pop. Bluegrass and flatpicking are one specialty, taught by mentors like Ross Martin and Greg Fleischut, and Robb Cappelletto, who mentors Billy Strings, also teaches jazz guitar.
Play bluegrass with a mentor in your corner
Apply and talk through your playing with a mentor on a free call, or start with the free training on the fretboard.