Billy Strings

How a Grammy-winning bluegrass guitarist quietly enrolled in Sonora three years ago to fill the gaps in his foundation, and what's happened to his playing since.

Billy in conversation with Sonora CEO Spencer Handley

“I've literally made it this far just winging it. But it got to a point where I felt like I was fooling myself. I'm supposed to be a professional musician, and I don't even know what this stuff means.”Billy Strings

Why a Grammy winner enrolled

By any external measure, Billy Strings had already arrived. Grammys. Sold out venues. Sessions with Chris Thile, Béla Fleck, and Edgar Meyer. But somewhere underneath the success, Billy was carrying a quieter feeling he could not shake: that his foundation had gaps in it, and that the room he was standing in could hear them too.

He had grown up around campfires at bluegrass festivals, learning entirely by ear. No theory, no formal harmonic vocabulary, no roadmap for the fretboard. That approach had taken him a long way. It also meant that when he found himself in sessions with players who could fluently name the chord they were looking at, he often felt, as he put it, “like an infant in the middle of the room kind of pretending to know what everybody's talking about.”

He had favorite licks. He called them his best friends. They had carried him for decades. The problem was that they were the only friends he had on the instrument, and he was getting tired of hearing himself reach for the same handful of ideas. He saw an ad on Instagram. It used the word plateau. He recognized himself in it and signed up.

The first lesson

Billy was paired with Robb Cappelletto, a longtime Sonora mentor with a deep background across jazz, bluegrass, rock, and the Bach violin repertoire. Robb took the assignment seriously.

“I practiced more for Billy's first lesson than I've ever practiced for one of my own lessons.”Robb Cappelletto, mentor

Robb started by codifying the scale fingerings Billy already had in open position and showing him how to move them through any key on the neck. Then he handed him “Back Home in Indiana,” one of the oldest tunes in the jazz standard repertoire and the basis of Charlie Parker's Donna Lee. They analyzed the form, named the function of each chord, then transposed the whole thing to A flat with no capo. It was the bridge Billy needed: a tune that lived in the borderlands of bluegrass and jazz, used to crack open the way he saw harmony across the entire fretboard.

What the work actually looks like

Sonora is not a course you click through. It is a long-running, one-to-one apprenticeship with a mentor who is paying attention. For Billy, that has meant weekly sessions with Robb, a dedicated Slack channel where every assignment, video, and piece of feedback is preserved from day one, and a spaced-repetition system inside the Sonora platform that surfaces the right material at the right time.

The star system is the part Billy keeps coming back to. As he demonstrates fluency on a concept, it gets retired from his daily practice and replaced with whatever is at the actual edge of his playing. Nothing stays on the queue out of habit, and nothing gets forgotten. The next thing is always the right next thing.

The Slack workflow has been its own small revelation. To send Robb a clip, Billy often has to film himself 15 or 20 times before he gets a take he is willing to share, which means the camera has been doing some of the teaching too.

“Chris Thile said it once. When we play, we almost hear what we want to sound like more than what we're actually sounding like. You listen back to the tape and it's like, that's not what it sounds like.”

When the work shows up on stage

Billy is careful not to force any of it. He is not trying to drag new vocabulary into his sets. He just plays, and lately the new vocabulary keeps showing up on its own.

One night he was sitting around picking “Bye Bye Blues,” a tune he had always navigated with cowboy chords and a lot of jumping around the neck. This time he ran the entire progression inside a four-fret window using the shell voicings Robb had been showing him. On a Doc Watson tune called “Key Signature,” he reached for what he expected to be a power chord and his hand reshaped itself into an inversion he had never played before in his life. The mandolin player looked over and said, “I hear you using them new chords.”

On his most recent record, the influence is intentional in places and accidental in others. The instrumental “Escanaba” was written around a ninth arpeggio pattern with directional picking that Robb had taught him. He learned Donna Lee, and a section of one of his own tunes started running that same shape over moving chord changes. The syncopation in the “Cabin Song” solo is something Robb heard, texted him about, and could not even take credit for. It was just Billy, sharper.

The technique question, and the tension question

For a player at Billy's level, the most useful thing a mentor can do is often not new content. It is upkeep. The grind of touring (airports, soundchecks, photo shoots, two days without picking up a guitar) tends to drag a player's technique back into old defaults: too much grip, too much tension, fingers fighting the fretboard. Billy describes a clear pattern. When he is sticking with his Sonora work, his technique stays clean, his range of motion stays fluid, and he can play at a lower percentage of effort. When he drops it, he can feel the tension creeping back into his hands and his voice.

Raising the ceiling matters. So does raising the floor on a bad day. Both are what the program is for.

The mentor's side

A conversation with Robb Cappelletto

Below, Robb walks through what mentoring Billy actually looks like behind the scenes. His teaching philosophy, why he refuses to give students answers without reasons, what he hears in Billy's latest record that traces back to their lessons, and the misconception that costs most guitar students years of progress.

Robb's teaching, in his own words

The conversation is worth watching in full, but a few of Robb's ideas are worth sitting with:

No two students get the same lessons in the same order. There are no prepackaged curricula. Robb builds the path around the player in front of him.
“Because I said so” is the enemy. Every opinion Robb holds about technique, voicing, or phrasing is grounded in something tangible about how it sounds. If you want it to sound this way, this is what you do.
Progress is a spiral, not a staircase. Theory, technique, ear training, improvisation, voice leading. Each loop returns to the same dimensions at a higher level of complexity. Review happens automatically because every new lesson is built on top of the last.
Two tempos: no tempo, and near full tempo. Inching the metronome up one BPM at a time hides bad fingerings until they ambush you at speed. You have to test the answer fast enough to know if it actually works.
Time is more important than notes. Most education obsesses over note choice. The players we love are the ones whose phrasing sits perfectly inside the beat. That is teachable, even though plenty of teachers will tell you it is not.
Get off the tab. Sound is the goal. The phone in your pocket can capture every note you played and every fret you played it on. The tablature on your screen cannot get you the rest of the way.

What three years has actually changed

Billy is the first to admit there is no shortcut, and he is not chasing one. He has come to terms with how long this kind of work takes, and how much practice has to compound before it surfaces in his playing. What has changed is that he now has a process he trusts, a mentor who is in it with him, and a way to measure that he is no longer treading water.

One afternoon on tour he caught himself procrastinating. Anything to avoid practice. He sat down, started running through his Sonora material, and 40 minutes later realized he was having fun. The thing he had been avoiding all day was the thing he most wanted to be doing. That is the quiet outcome of this kind of program. The work stops feeling like a tax on the music and starts feeling like the music itself.

“I'm proud to be a student in the Sonora camp. I look forward to the next several years of this. It never ends, and it's awesome. I finally found a way to get myself to learn.”Billy Strings

If you recognize yourself in this

You do not have to be Billy Strings to benefit from what he benefited from. If you have been playing for years, and you can feel yourself reaching for the same handful of ideas, and you cannot quite name what is holding you back, the right next step is a conversation with a real coach. We built one for that. It is a free 50 minute one-on-one with a Sonora coach who runs you through an 18-point diagnostic of your playing. You leave with a written report, the two or three things actually holding you back, and a 30 day practice plan to start working on them.

Book Your Free Skills Assessment

Or, if you're ready to apply for a seat in the program, start your application here.