Bluegrass Guitar: Rattling the Leaves Off the Trees
Flatpicking a break on an unamplified acoustic guitar in a bluegrass band is not an easy task. The odds are that your arms are burning because lactic acid is already building up in the striated tissue that makes up the muscles in your forearms. This is all because the banjo player kicked off the tune at 180 beats per minute and you have been mashing chords at that rate for the last three and a half minutes. Note that the guitar is ALWAYS the last one to take a break. Don’t ask me why this is the case, but trust me, it is. It is kind of like leftovers – all the other instruments have had their run at it, now maybe let’s allow the guitar to have a break.
So, you now find yourself in the situation of holding a guitar on stage in front of a zillion people, ¾ the way through a song moving at supersonic speed, arm muscles totally fatigued and burning, and the fiddle player nods to you to take a break. You will very quickly realize that the only weapon you have available is a flatpick slamming on a guitar string and even with superhuman strength, it can’t cut through all the shrillness of banjos, mandolins and fiddles. But somehow, you manage to pull off one or two of your best Tony licks and the crowd goes wild.
This is the life of a guitarist in a modern bluegrass setting. We are working our way through each of the five primary instruments and their roles in the creation of the modern Bluegrass sound. In the previous chapter, we took a look at the bass fiddle. In this chapter, we will review the bluegrass guitar and the important function that it performs in contemporary bluegrass.
My involvement with the instrument started in 1971, when my cousin Roger showed me a few chords on an old Stella guitar. I have been an ad—hoc guitar player ever since with an occasional stint as a guitarist performing in Bluegrass and Old-Time bands here and there.
This is from our co-instructor Brian Duffy on his involvement with the guitar:
In 1962 the Folk Music Craze was well underway, everyone seemed to be playing the guitar, and I wanted to join them. I cobbled together about $40 from snow shoveling and other chores and my dad took me to Wurlitzer’s on Chestnut St. in Philly where I bought a Kay archtop, steel strings, high action. I learned some chords from Sing Out Magazine and a Peter, Paul & Mary book. I didn’t really start playing any (what I thought was) bluegrassy stuff until I got to college and met a few banjo players and other guitar players.
Bluegrass Guitar 101
Historians think the guitar originated as a Spanish instrument and was derived from the lute. It was brought over to the new world, maybe via Germany in 1833 by C. F. Martin and others like him, and widely introduced into string band music in the Southeastern US during the 1920s. Before then, people were entertained in the southern mountains with only a fiddle or perhaps a fiddle and a banjo. Guitarists such as Riley Puckett, who played in the string band “Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers,” pioneered the “boom-chuck” backup style that serves so effectively in bluegrass music today. If you listen to some of these early recordings (below), you can clearly hear the ring of the alternating bass strings and rudimentary bass runs in Riley’s guitar work.
Let’s quickly go through a few basics. Production of sound by bluegrass guitarists consists of using a pick striking a steel (or bronze) string. Lester and Carter both used a thumb pick and got a big sound that way and so does Danny Paisley, but most others use a flatpick. In a band setting, the bluegrass guitarist’s chief job is to play chords that accompany the vocalist or instrumentalists. The fullness of a guitar strumming chords pretty much fills in the mid-range frequencies and helps create the “wall of sound” that is so characteristic of bluegrass music. The guitar blends in so well with the other instruments that you don’t really appreciate its contributions to the sound until you hear the hole that is created when a guitarist breaks a string and stops playing to change it.
The basic bluegrass guitar strum is a “boom-chuck.” The “boom” is the downstroke picking of an eighth note on one of the low-pitched guitar strings. The “chuck” is a strummed chord, also with an eighth note time value, and also with a downstroke. It sounds just like what Riley was playing in the above video, but nobody really does a plain “boom-chuck” strum anymore unless the song is moving along at a pretty good clip. More modern bluegrass guitar backup patterns add various accents and emphases in the form of strums and licks. A straightforward extension of “boom-chuck” is to add sixteenth notes (played as upstrokes), which sound like “boom-chuck-a” and “boom-pa-chuck-a”. We will discuss these in detail further below.
Its All in the Timing
The clean and tasteful execution of a break on a flattop guitar is always nice to hear but driving the rhythm groove is where the guitarist really earns her pay and is an absolutely essential part of the bluegrass sound. They don’t call it rhythm guitar for nothing. It is also where things can start to fall apart if one is not careful.
In order to illustrate this concept, we will need to refer to a timing diagram for a bluegrass band. If you are not a musician and don’t totally get these timing diagrams, that’s ok. We are also including several videos (interspersed in the text below) and you can skip the detailed descriptions of the timing charts if you want to, and go right to the videos. They will contain musical performances that illustrate the concepts.
The timing diagram below constitutes a full measure of a bluegrass tune in 2/4 timing. Time flows from left to right.
Going from the bottom of the diagram to the top: The lowest portion represents the bass “root-fiving” (as discussed in the bass chapter) – bass notes aligned on quarter notes, played right on the downbeats. Directly above is the Mandolin chop (e.g. chop = chord being struck quickly), which occurs on the offbeat. The sixteenth notes of a banjo forward roll are illustrated right above the mandolin chop – T = thumb, I = index finger and M = middle finger (these three fingers on the right hand are used to pick the banjo).
The topmost layer represents the guitar, which is the subject of our discussion in this chapter. The picture shows the most basic “boom-chuck” strum, the same one that Riley Puckett did back in the ‘20s. Notice that the start of the “boom” aligns with the bass’ thump and the start of the “chuck” aligns with the mandolin’s chop. Once again, the “boom” would be the right hand picking one of the guitar’s lower strings and the “chuck” would be the right hand playing multiple (higher) strings in the form of a chord.
In order to illustrate how a proficient bluegrass guitarist sets up the rhythm for the rest of the band, it will be necessary to add some sixteenth notes to the guitar strum. Let’s look at an exemplary “boom-pa-chuck-a” strum, which consists solely of sixteenth notes (please note again that this is an oversimplified diagram, and that great guitarists will vary their strumming pattern far more than indicated here).
The important point shown in this diagram is that the starts of all of the sixteenth notes are fully aligned from top to bottom. Just like focusing a pair of binoculars, every instrument becomes synchronized, and the resulting sound becomes clear and crisp.
Here is an example of Jason Davis picking the absolute fire out of a banjo at a Galax (Virginia) jam session. Because the song is moving right along at about 150 beats per minute, there is very little swing and the timing is pretty square. You can see Kenny Smith driving the rhythm with a basic square-ish guitar strum, as illustrated in the above timing diagram. This kind of a strum is fully appropriate for such a song moving at this rate of speed. Just listen to the first part of the video and you’ll get the idea of what a “boom-chuck” rhythm is supposed to sound like.
Swing it Baby…
At this point in our discussion, there is no lilt or swing indicated. If executed exactly as shown in the “no swing” timing diagram above, especially for slow or medium speed songs, the resulting “music” would sound very mechanical – as if a 1980’s era computer was doing the composing and performing. So, let’s introduce some swing, in order to illustrate what starts to happen in a real bluegrass band.
As the red arrows indicate, both of the sixteenth note guitar upstrokes – the “pa” and the “a” – have moved to the right. Also note that some of the banjo notes have moved to the right an equal amount. In addition, the grace notes that precede the mandolin chop have moved to the right. And the bass notes are lengthened so the end of the note coincides with the new “swung” beat. All these notes are still aligned but occur a few tens of milliseconds later in time.
Here is an example of what a heavy swing – or syncopation – sounds like. This video is from Alison Krauss and Union Station just swinging the heck out of Blue Trail of Sorrow:
Before we go any further, I’d like to caution against interpreting all this pedagogy too literally – the definition of “lilt” is far more complex than a couple of swung sixteenth notes. But please bear with me as I use this example to illustrate the power of a good rhythm guitar track.
Setting the Groove
We can now discuss how a good guitarist can really start to define and drive the rhythm for the band. The amount of swing (e.g. the length of the red arrows in the above diagram) will vary depending on the feel that is necessary to make a particular song sound good for a particular bluegrass ensemble on a particular day with a particular phase of the moon. And as we can see from the diagram, the placement of the sixteenth note upstrokes (the “pa” and the “a”) strongly contributes to setting the amount of lilt or swing for our particular song. The competent guitarist will use these types of strokes (and more importantly, lots of other accents and off-beat licks) to assert exactly the right feel for our particular song with poise and style. The guitar strum now sounds something like “BOOOOOM-pa-CHUUUUUCK-a.” Others in the band should follow with this particular amount of swing (among other things) – otherwise, musical notes will sound “out of focus.”
Let’s move to an example. Jimmy Martin was one of the great bluegrass rhythm players (and quite a fashionable dresser) who always made sure his guitar work was featured prominently in the mix. Audie Blaylock, an inveterate Jimmy Martin alumnus, has said that Jimmy’s timing was better than anybody. Have a listen to his 1958 recording of Hold What You Got in the key of F and see if you don’t agree. If you don’t have this recording already in your library, you can find Jimmy performing this recording on stage at a reunion event with JD Crowe and Paul Williams. If you can stand the sight of Jimmy strutting and wiggling, have a look at this video which is a college level course in rhythm and timing.
In the recording (and the stage performance), Jimmy imparts a rhythmic feel with absolutely take-no-prisoners impunity. It starts with him strumming a big fat E position chord (capo on 1st fret) “boom chuck” then “boom-pa-chuck-a” then “boom-chuck-a…” Listen to that last sixteenth note (the “a”) – hear how syncopated it is? When JD comes in with that horrible and annoying melodic style banjo lick, listen to how the notes are placed with exactly the same amount of swing as Jimmy’s guitar strum. And when Jimmy and tenor Paul Williams start singing, listen to how their words are swung in such a way that they exactly fit with Jimmy’s strumming. Buddy Harmon’s snare and Lightnin’ Chance’s bass (yup somebody really named their child Lightnin’) are also completely in sync. Listen in particular to the end of Lightnin’s bass notes and how they end exactly at Paul’s mandolin chops. The result is a sound that is clean and crisp, and is swinging like Glen Miller Orchestra playing In the Mood back in 1940.
Making The Bluegrass Sound Cool: Creating Tension and Drive
At this point, we need to talk about one of the coolest things a truly experienced bluegrass band can do: mess around with the timing without losing the beat.
Now, this is not for novice musicians. This is not the sort of thing that happens at a jam where somebody is still trying to remember whether the song has two G chords or four before the C. In order for this to work, the band has to be highly experienced and very tightly synchronized rhythmically. Everybody must already agree — deeply, instinctively, and without litigation — where the beat lives.
Once that foundation is in place, something magical can start to happen.
Sammy Shelor explains this beautifully in one of his workshop videos (below). He describes drive as playing “around the beat” — a little ahead of it, right on it, or a little behind it, depending on the effect you want. He points out that this is not the same thing as speeding up. It is a matter of note placement, not tempo. In other words, the beat itself stays put, but the musicians can lean on it, push against it, or lay back from it in subtle ways that create tremendous feel. (Note that Sammy is a banjo player and this is the guitar section, but we feel that this video and discussion is just as essential for guitarists as it is for banjo players. We will revisit this in the next chapter from the banjo’s perspective.)
This is where a strong guitar player becomes especially important. In a polished bluegrass band, the guitar and banjo often work together in this respect, and the same can be true of the mandolin while taking a solo or filling between vocal lines. The core pulse remains locked down by the band as a whole, but individual instruments can slightly advance the timing on a fill to create urgency, or retard it just a hair to create a more relaxed, greasy, or suspended feel. If everyone in the band hears and supports the same rhythmic placement, the effect can be incredibly cool.
It is rather like a great driver taking a curve fast. The car does not leave the road, but everybody in it can feel that something exciting is happening.
And that is the important point: the effect only works if the underlying rhythm is absolutely secure. If the timing is not already synchronized, then trying to play around the beat does not sound cool. It sounds like the band is having a disagreement on where the beat is, and everything starts to sound like it is out of focus.
But when a seasoned band does it right, the results can be electrifying. The music seems to surge forward without actually speeding up. It develops tension, lift, swagger, and that elusive quality listeners often call drive. This is part of what separates a merely competent bluegrass band from one that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
So yes, good timing means putting the note exactly where it belongs. But great timing sometimes means knowing exactly how far you can move it — together or separately — and still make the whole band feel even more locked in.
This is what the timing diagram will look like if (for example) the guitar and the banjo push ahead just a bit while the mandolin and the bass hold the rhythm firmly in check. The red arrows show how the guitar and banjo notes advance in time, occurring just a hair earlier than expected.
And this next timing diagram shows the reverse: how the guitar and banjo delay just a bit while the mandolin and bass hold firm. Arrows to the right show a slight delay in the timing of the notes which will occur later in the timing diagram than expected.
Unless you are a very experienced musician, do not feel bad if you cannot hear every last detail of this push and pull in the individual instruments. But the final result (in the video below) is obvious and will hit you square in the face. Check out the extreme drive and groove on this cut of the Lonesome River Band. We last visited this same cut in the bass chapter, but I think it is so instructive re: drive and groove that it is worth revisiting here, in the guitar section. You can really feel the result of Ronnie Bowman (sadly R.I.P. recently) and Don Rigsby holding firmly on to the beat with bass and mandolin while Sammy Shelor (banjo) and Tim Austin (guitar) start pushing and pulling at the timing. Check out Sammy’s second banjo break at ~ 2:20 in the video, where the entire band just warps the hell out of the timing (especially near the end of his break) – it really feels like you are experiencing a trip to a fun house filled with those goofy warped mirrors!
Just for comparison’s sake, below is the original version of the same tune, recorded by Flatt and Scruggs in the 60s. They, of course, do a fine job and it is pleasant to listen to. But it is a very different sort of sound, one that you might say is not as driving as the LRB version. And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear that the actual speed of the Flatt and Scruggs version is almost identical to the LRB cut. But, of course, it not nearly as syncopated as LRB’s and there is no pushing or pulling of time by Flatt, Scruggs or any of their sidemen either – it is dead even, just like the tick of a fine watch.
Now that we have seen how things can really click with a strong guitarist, this is a good place to mention what happens with a perhaps less experienced guitar player. If our inchoate guitar player does not have a good idea of what a particular song needs to feel like rhythmically, and therefore cannot drive the appropriate amount of lilt, then the entire sound suffers. There is no consistent feel being established for the rhythm of a particular song and things generally fall flat. A great rhythm guitar player is something to be thankful for, as she makes a huge contribution to the overall sound.
Punctuation
Let’s get back to the Jimmy Martin theme. All good phrasing has punctuation and Jimmy used to talk about exactly that: The G run kind of punctuation. He used to boast that his G-run would rattle the windows and shake the leaves off the trees. I have no reason to doubt Jimmy on this assertion either. Listen to his version of Uncle Pen. There it is right in the open – the G-run… BOOM! You can’t miss it. In fact, the G-run has become probably the most archetypal series of notes ever to be played in a bluegrass setting. The next time you hear a flatpicking break, I’ll bet that the guitarist punctuates it with some sort of a G-run at the end – make sure you listen for it.
The G-run is the very first set of notes that you hear in this recording. It is repeated at the end of every chorus, as the band transitions into a fiddle break. Jimmy also is inserting a G-run at the end of every verse and at the end of the fiddle break too.
Dynamics is defined as notes, passages and phrases that differ in volume and emphasis (loud/soft). If the G run is the ‘period’ of bluegrass guitar punctuation, then the various forms of dynamics that our guitarist uses are the commas and semicolons. See if you can hear where a strong downbeat is accompanied by a “Carolina Slam” – or a louder than usual guitar strum – perhaps in the middle of a banjo break. Listen carefully to the swelling of volume when the vocalist takes a breath – and then again at the end of the verse, right before the G run.
Here is a timing diagram that illustrates the “Carolina Slam”. It is not always as prominent as indicated in the diagram, and modern bluegrass rhythm guitar is full of many different variations of this strumming pattern. Some patterns are more subtle than others, and they all add to the dynamics of a performance.
The video below, of Newfound Road’s performance of “My Heart’s Breaking” shows the power of the Carolina Slam which occurs multiple times. The first one is right at the very beginning, in fact it is the very first strum of the guitar. Also, listen to the guitar strum right before the vocalist starts the first words “My Heart’s Breaking. That is also a classic slam.
These are but a couple of examples of how dynamics can build on a solid foundation of synchronized syncopation (did I really write that?) to yield a solid and toe tapping performance.
Mash
If the G-run is one kind of punctuation, and the Carolina Slam is another, then mash is what happens when a whole bluegrass band starts talking in boldface with three exclamation points. One of the more interesting developments in bluegrass over the last few decades is this thing musicians began calling mash. Thomas Cassell, in a master’s thesis at ETSU on the subject, argues that the musical center of mash is the downbeat — not just rhythm in a general sense, but the band’s shared effort to make that downbeat hit with maximum force and authority. In his formulation, “Mash is the downbeat.” For years, though, mash lived in that familiar bluegrass category of things everybody recognized and almost nobody could define. It was very much a you know it when you hear it proposition — rather like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line about pornography, except with fewer Supreme Court justices and more people standing around in a jam tent glaring at one another. And that is part of the point: mash is never just a collection of licks or a slightly more aggressive right hand. It is also a whole attitude.
The culture around mash matters nearly as much as the notes. These jams have developed a reputation for making onlookers want to throw things and thrash about because of how intense the downbeats and rhythm section are. The fans love it, but the message to an unprepared picker is equally clear: this is not the place to wander in casually and start plunking along unless you have a firm grasp of what kind of rhythmic violence is already underway. A mash jam is often treated as a kind of “perfect” jam, and like many ideals of perfection, it can be inspiring if you are inside the circle and a little terrifying if you are not. That social intensity tells us something important about the music itself: mash is about alignment, commitment, and shared rhythmic intent, not just volume and youthful over-caffeination.
At the musical level, mash takes the very thing Sammy Shelor was talking about in the previous section — playing around the beat — and turns the screws tighter. Shelor says drive has to do with where the notes are placed around the beat, and the band has to think together almost like a drum kit. That idea is central here. The bass, guitar, and mandolin chop must hold the pulse so securely that the whole ensemble trusts it completely. Only then can the other instruments begin to push, pull, suspend, and warp the timing in subtle ways without losing the beat. This is why mash is not simply fast bluegrass or loud bluegrass. In fact, one of the great paradoxes of mash is that it can sound as though it is lunging forward with reckless abandon while actually remaining under exquisite rhythmic control. If the G-run is a period and the Carolina Slam is an exclamation point, mash is a whole paragraph of controlled rhythmic mayhem. Oh, and it must be in the key of B (or Bb). Don’t even ask why.
This is also why the guitar matters so much in mash. In that setting, rhythm guitar is not merely accompaniment, nor is it just some poor soul in the background hammering boom-chuck. The guitar is one of the main ways the band creates pressure, momentum, punctuation, and release. It helps generate the pocket, supports the downbeat, and participates in the very pushing and pulling that make the music feel dangerous in the best possible way. So mash is not just a style; it is a particular reimagining of traditional bluegrass in which rhythm, dynamics, and ensemble alignment are pushed toward an almost theatrical extreme. One can certainly have drive without mashing, but all mashing has drive. And when a really seasoned band does it right, the result is thrilling, mean, and so cool that it can make a normal person want to throw furniture.
Here is what mash sounds like… with Sammy Shelor leading a jam in “camp B Chord” at the Galax fiddler’s convention in Virginia. And yeah, there is a little too much testosterone flowing here. Listen especially to the guitar, which is very prominent and is using maybe a little too many Carolina Slams.
Picking out the Melody
Since we now have a foundation for the rhythm and groove led by our inveterate bluegrass guitarist, it is now time to start thinking about giving him an instrumental break. One of the earliest and still among the best ways to pull a melody out of a guitar is to use a so-called “Carter Scratch.” Made popular first by Maybelle Carter in the late ‘20s and since copied by many, this technique consists of extending the “boom” notes from the “boom-chuck” strum to include a melody instead of just lower notes on the guitar. Chords are interspersed between the melody notes, so it sounds quite full even with a single guitar. Any guitarist worth a nickel can play Wildwood Flower using a Carter Scratch and this technique actually works quite well on many mid-tempo songs. Below is a video of Mother Maybelle using her eponymous scratch.
Flatpicking guitar became popular in the 1970s, led by Doc Watson, Tony Rice and others. As mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter, this intricate form of picking is highly demanding. As you might suspect from the name, the technique is, indeed, performed with a flatpick, and a melody is typically played in sixteenth notes with up/down/up/down motion of the pick. If you have a hankering to start flatpicking, remember to follow this “up/down” rule even when seems to make no sense to do so – say if a rest or an extra eighth note occurs in an inopportune place, the pick direction can get backwards on you. Professional help is advised if you can’t sort this out – if you learn to do this wrong, I can guarantee you will not be able to play faster than about 90 beats per minute and it will take years to untangle your bad habits.
Rules however are made to be broken, and crosspicking does just that. Jesse McReynolds pioneered this technique on the mandolin and it has been adapted to the guitar by any number of guitarists in Ralph Stanley’s band, the first one to do so being the late George Shuffler. If you have ever heard him on one of Ralph’s recordings, you know how beautiful this technique can be. Below is a video where Mr. Shuffler demonstrates crosspicking.
It exactly replicates the 3-3-2 pattern imprinted on the brains of Scruggs-style banjoists, and forces melody notes to occur slightly ahead or behind their usual spots. This fits the very definition of syncopation (covered in the section “Bluegrass Break-down” later in the book) and will cause even the clumsiest among us to want to get up and dance. As with the banjo, it takes hours and hours of mindless practice to do this maneuver with any speed, but once you can do it you will inspire envy in all your friends and relatives.
Tony Rice
No treatise on bluegrass guitar can be complete without a word or two about Tony Rice. Tony was just about singularly responsible for defining what we now know as contemporary bluegrass guitar playing. He has managed to incorporate all the elements of rhythm, syncopation, phrasing, punctuation and most especially, improvisation into a tightly knit and coherent string of notes that has to be heard to be appreciated. He has set precedence for what the standard for a modern guitar break should sound like, and more frequently than not, flashy guitar breaks of the 21st century are built around Tony-isms.
Here is a video of Tony doing his classic work on the old standard, “9 pound hammer”
In summary, guitar is where most of us (yours truly included) started in bluegrass. Further, many of us can play a few chords and fill in a bit on rhythm. But bluegrass guitar backup and flatpicking lead is far more involved than anyone might have imagined and an absolutely necessary part of great bluegrass.
We will conclude this section with a listing of some of the more influential guitar players in bluegrass music. Be sure to listen to their music when you get a chance.
Foundational / Historical Figures
| Riley Puckett | Early string band guitarist whose boom-chuck rhythm shaped later bluegrass guitar backup |
| Maybelle Carter | Hugely influential early guitarist; her “Carter Scratch” helped define melody-and-rhythm accompaniment in American roots music |
| Lester Flatt | One of the defining early bluegrass guitarists; with Flatt & Scruggs he helped establish the classic bluegrass rhythm guitar sound and strong lead vocal accompaniment |
| Carter Stanley | A deeply influential early guitarist and singer whose rhythm playing and song style helped shape traditional bluegrass guitar. |
| George Shuffler | Early master with the Stanley Brothers; helped pioneer the use of crosspicking as a bluegrass guitar vocabulary. |
| Doc Watson | Revolutionary flatpicker who helped elevate the guitar from primarily a rhythm instrument into a powerful lead voice in bluegrass and acoustic music. |
Modern Masters / Major Influential Players
| Clarence White | One of the most groundbreaking flatpickers in bluegrass history; transformed lead guitar vocabulary with speed, tone, and fluid improvisation. |
| Tony Rice | For many listeners, the modern gold standard of bluegrass guitar; redefined tone, rhythm, lead playing, and the overall role of the guitar in acoustic music. |
| Norman Blake | Highly influential stylist known for tasteful lead playing, strong rhythm, and deep connection to older American string band traditions. |
| Dan Crary | One of the most important modern flatpickers; helped expand the technical and melodic possibilities of bluegrass guitar. |
| Bryan Sutton | One of the most admired contemporary guitarists, known for extraordinary precision, groove, versatility, and deep traditional grounding. |
| David Grier | Hugely respected modern guitarist whose improvisational freedom and technique have influenced an entire generation of players. |
| Molly Tuttle | One of the leading current bluegrass guitarists; widely admired for both flatpicking and songwriting, and a major figure for newer audiences. |
| Billy Strings | A high-profile modern guitarist whose playing bridges traditional bluegrass vocabulary and a broader contemporary audience. |
| Jake Workman | An important current bluegrass guitarist known for clean fast execution and connection to the classic style. |
| Cody Kilby | A major contemporary guitarist respected for both bluegrass and broader acoustic/country musicianship. |
| Chris Luquette | A modern / progressive flatpicker with a very avant guard style. |