Blind-Summit
THE GUITAR PLAYERS COMMUNITY

Start A Rock Band DVD Pack

We’d like to encourage more people to learn to play the guitar (the one with the frets, not the buttons) and to help you, we’ve been lucky enough to get a copy of the "Start A Rock Band" video lesson pack from the guys at NextLevelGuitar - grab a real guitar and let’s rock!

Background

Since 2005, the Guitar Hero series has seen massive worldwide success breaking the $1 billion total sales barrier. They now have 8 different titles of game available to Playstation, Nintendo Wii, XBox and also on PC / Mac.

Two years later saw the release of the first Rock Band game, followed in 2008 by the sequel Rock band 2. The game has similar gameplay and controllers as the Guitar Hero series. As of March this year, Rock band has also reached the $1 billion total sales figure.

These two games have captivated a staggering amount of people however musicians and guitar tutors have been divided in their views of whether the game encourages people to progress to a real instrument, or remain glued to a TV screen.

What They Say

"Basically we have a full on instructional website where we teach students all over the world how to play guitar or how to get their playing to the next level. Our site has over 450 video lessons, written lessons, gear demos and reviews, chord library, forum, and much more. Its a membership site and has lessons for beginners, intermediates and advanced players."

The Start A Rock Band pack is a set of lessons designed to get you playing some of the tracks from the Guitar Hero game series.

What You Get

The Start a Rock Band pack contains 12 DVDs with the following songs:

• “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” - Pat Benatar
• “Sweet Home Alabama” - Lynyrd Skynyrd
• “Black Magic Woman” - Santana
• “You Really Got Me” - The Kinks
• “More Than A Feeling” - Boston
• “Dust In The Wind” - Kansas
• “Smoke On The Water” - Deep Purple
• “Detroit Rock City” - Kiss
• “American Pie” - Don McLean
• “La Grange” -ZZ Top
• “Free Bird” - Lynyrd Skynyrd
• “Barracuda” - Heart

The DVDs

The DVDs come in a plastic case so that you can keep them all together - they are printed with the song name and the NextLevelGuitar branding - all very professional so far.

Each DVD provides an introduction to the song - normally a quick play through the opening bars. You’re then given a menu to select the specific sections of the song that you wish to focus on - the main riffs, the bridge, solos, outro etc etc.

Each section is well explained, with chord patterns and progressions displayed on screen. The instructors offer words of encouragement, and they genuinely look like they are enjoying playing and teaching you the lesson. So many "pro" instructional DVDs are more of an ego booster or showcase to that particular artist and probably don’t really help you much! These guys really want to help you play better - personally I found that motivated me to spend more time learning.

This is an example of one of the video lessons:

Various parts of the lessons also show a very close zoomed shot of the left hand that helps you see the finger positions and notes played. Again, this is shown at a slow pace so it’s really easy to follow. However, sometimes it does feel a little slow progressing through the more simple songs, but the pack is intended more for the beginner player. The pace of learning the solos is just about right (from my point of view anyway).

There isn’t a great deal of theory (which again for the intended audience is probably a good thing) but when it is covered - it helps to give you a little understanding as to why some notes are played over certain chords. Generally this will be based on notes in a scale and chords from a certain key - most of the theory is wrapped up in its own chapter on the DVD so you can skip it if you want to just get on with learning the track.

The pack doesn’t come with any printed material such as chord boxes or tablature. Their website does have some material, but it would be nice to have a hard copy to read along with the video itself.

Overall

The Start a Rock Band DVD pack is a great tool to help you get to grips with some of the Guitar Hero classic tracks. Each DVD is split up into logical sections and the licks and riffs are played through at a speed that almost saves you having to even stop the DVD to learn certain bits. It’s perfect for people that are making the transition to real guitars from the Guitar Hero games.

I have been playing for a few years, but the Free Bird lesson by Jennifer Gamble helped me learn some slide guitar. Something I’d probably have never even thought about doing before.

To give a fair review, there are a few things that would help improve the DVD pack. I would like to have seen a short section for each song that explains the guitar and amp settings that they use. Quite often I hear beginners that suffer just as much with the setup as they do with learning the song. Ear training will develop, but as a kick start - a brief overview of the "sound" would be great.

It would be helpful to have a hard copy of the guitar tablature to accompany the videos. This is a useful reference and having it in front of you helps to visualise the patterns and postions of chords and notes.

Lastly, and this is just personal preference, but having a bit more of a mix of songs would be good. The classics are great but I’d like to have seen a couple of more modern rock tracks or one of the metal tracks. Like I said - personal preference and this may be just one of several guitar packs.

The pack comes in at $99 which is a good price given that each DVD is around the 2 hour mark and you get 12 DVDs (songs) in the pack. The lessons are clear and well explained - lots of close up shots to show the hand positions, and the media quality itself is good. For the budding guitar heros out there - I reccomend this.

Special thanks to David Taub for sorting this pack out for me. Very helpful and an all round nice guy - thanks.

Visit their site over at nextlevelguitar.com or check out some of the free lessons on their youtube channel.