This was a truly exceptional piece of work. Having gone through several hundred instructional videos in the past few years, this was a standout gem. Rick Ruskin is both an amazing player and a natural teacher, and the songs are dope, too. On the technical side, Ruskin has the whole Kottke tool kit at his disposal. He takes apart six different songs with a confident and patiently paced attention to detail. Personally, my favorite part of his approach was his non-stop compositional notes: instead of just showing you how to play passages like he does, he also demonstrates alternate fingerings and voicings.
The opening track, "6 String Conspiracy" serves as a single-lesson introduction to the advanced vocabulary of techniques here. The song begins on a simple riff anyone can learn, then fills it out into chords, then an alternating bassline, and by the 8th bar or so, you're going to be fully immersed in classical American fingerstyle ragtime apocalypse blues. Naturally, how long it takes to make that transition will depend on how much experience you've got attempting to replicate John Fahey or Mississippi John Hurt. Still, it's downright noble for a high-level lesson plan like this to make itself so accessible to the newbz.
Between all the songs, Ruskin drops a ton of gems on practice drills and how to develop your own fingerstyle compositions. This is a full 2 hours of a world class lesson and I'm going to be learning from this for years to come.
VERDICT: 10/10 This is gold standard material.
