Lick Library: The Taco Bell of Guitar Instruction

In our recent mad dash to learn everything possible about the instrument, I've watched over a dozen titles from the Lick Library DVD series now. Odds are pretty strong that I will never watch another one in my life. There's probably hundreds more of them out there, I just can't bring myself to do it again. Based on what we've seen, the Wombat Radio staff agrees: the Lick Library brand is the reliable warning sign of a mediocre product.

That said, they're also pretty great.

It's always tempting to do a savagely sarcastic critical review, but 7th grade was a long time ago, so the sad legacy of the Lick Library is presented here as food for thought. What the hell are we learning guitar for?

Lick Library knows their target demo and they have their template down. Their approach is starkly simple: everything is black backgrounds and long single camera shots, but of course that's not inherently bad. The problems begin with the teachers, who are generally as engaging and competent as the average Guitar Center employee. Lessons are rambling, theory is sparse, and the overall feel is approximately public access cable. Lick Library stands as a contrast to the much beloved library of Homespun Tapes, which was a labor of love by one Happy Traum, who made it a point to feature the best musicians in their field.

Yet Lick Library excels, not as teaching material, but as a business model. By the dying standards of music publishing, their output has been huge, and it's instructive to look at the products in question. Success is shaped by demand, and the bulk of what gets sold under their banner falls into two categories: Styles for Dummies and Artists for Clones. Neither is intended as an insult, let me explain...

"Styles for Dummies" is exemplified by a DVD like "Rock Guitar in 6 Weeks" -- which is as close to a real life version of "Guitar for the Practicing Attorney" as real life gets. The focus is on shortcuts and paint-by-numbers examples, and the instruction was confusingly shallow until I realized the aim was looking good. Now, that's the valid goal of a big damn demographic, and they're all clearly buying up DVDs on Amazon in 2012.

"Artists for Clones" is a genre I can personally relate to more. I wanted to be a clone of everyone who inspired me to play and learn guitar, from David Gilmour to Leo Kottke to Ali Farka Toure. There is great value in learning every part of a Metallica song because those cats were outstanding songwriters. This is where Lick Library really shines and redeems itself, too. Teaching hit songs is exactly what the average Guitar Center employee is qualified to teach, after all, and giving people songs in context is a world away from the autopsy pointlessness of something like "50 Metal Killer Licks," which is actually not a joke title.

As much as Top 40 radio is synonymous with brain death, the canon of American Radio Rock actually has a ton of beautiful gems. The vocabulary of your average sports bar cover band is a simple one, but the jukebox always has room for immortal wizardry like Pink Floyd, Boston, Journey, Steely Dan -- really serious musicianship and ambitious song structures. Hell, I could have just brought up "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" and left it at that.

Wagner and Schubert and Bach leak into pop music like it was a wooden basement, and the Old Masters hang out on vinyl and perpetually resurface like drug dealers on a college campus. Coltrane is always luring away lead guitar players for years at a time, and every metalhead shred technician I've met is obsessed with Django Reinhardt because they know. Even animals know. Everything loves good music, even plants.

These days, both Homespun and Lick Library have transitioned into online businesses, with podcast lessons, Facebook pages, all manner of shiny horseshit. No sense in bemoaning the progress of market logic, though. For instance, guitar magazines are glorified catalogs and hero worship and worse, but they're also the vehicle for a lot of quality information, not to mention the steady employment of a great many sketchy musician types. Taco Bell might be crap but they do feed people.

Still, distinctions are good, especially at the outset of a new project. Whatever this grows into, we're interested in the deep end of the pool...the heavy lifting, the really weird stuff. If there's anything I can say with certainty, it's this: I am writing for songwriters, not cover bands.

Either way, though, I love you all. Except for Aaron Gilmartin.

Effortless Classical Guitar by William Kanengiser

I learned guitar wrong. I'm still working on correcting bad habits a decade later. Over the years, one of the best explanations on "economy of motion" I've ever seen is this DVD -- which was a battered VHS tape when I first encountered it.

It's hard to appreciate the full meaning of classical training until you see what Kanengiser outlines here. What he's demonstrating is the collective knowledge of several generations of conservatory playing. This is a centuries old guild system of international competition and exchange being transmitted to you via the miracle of technology.

Both neo-classical and Hindustani slide are proof that this kind of precision training pays off...and pays off far beyond the realm of Bach recitals. No matter where you want to take you playing, the fundamentals that get explained here are The Rules you need to learn in order to break.

Easy Steps to Bossa Nova Guitar by Aaron Gilmartin

A guitar lesson is a long face to face conversation. Most of the time, that works out fine for everyone involved, but once in awhile, it's too weird to handle. This video is a prime example. I was so uncomfortable making eye contact with Aaron Gilmartin I was unable to make it very far past the ten minute mark here.

How did this happen? It doesn't help that he opened up the video by singing. Things get worse when it turns out to be a vaguely "Bossa Nova" song in English with mindlessly antiseptic Hallmark lyrics. Really, though, the biggest problem was Aaron Gilmartin's eyes. I don't know the man beyond this digital artifact, but I am convinced he is tormented by serious psychological demons which constantly scream in silence from his baby blue eyes. However, let's look past that -- even though I personally could not.

Despite what I've just said, Gilmartin is a relaxed and fast-paced teacher who makes pains to craft a lesson for beginners. He spends a lot of time taking the chord shapes new players are familiar with, thanks to their godawful power-chord radio crap taste in music, and translating those cliches into Bossa Nova concepts. He also offers a solid but inaccurate introduction to the song formats and conventions of the form. I would venture that learning it vaguely wrong is not necessarily bad as an introduction -- more advanced lessons from more experienced teachers will set you right, should you choose to pursue Bossa Nova as an artform.

You'd be insane not to.

For more advanced players -- those with exotic chord experience and familiarity with the genre of Bossa Nova -- this is not worth your time.

VERDICT: 3/10 Beginners who have never done psychedelic drugs and demonstrate no latent psychic abilities should be able to get a perfectly good guitar lesson out of this. Otherwise, abandon all hope.

Acoustic Fingerstyle with Rick Ruskin

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.

Learn to Play Django-Style Gypsy Jazz Guitar by Paul Mehling

Paul Mehling is a master player and this series of lessons is a bargain. This is a meticulous examination of Django's work and Mehling is careful to strick strictly to the original voicing...and even tone...based on surviving recordings of Gypsy King at work.

Mehling is a solid teacher. He exceeds at teaching you how to hear Django's work effectively. He explains the shadings and embellishments individually until all the complexities gypsy chord progressions start to make playable sense.

VERDICT: 10/10 This two volume set represents a pretty total instruction in an insanely complicated & ornate style. This is one of the best challenges you can take on.

Arranging for Solo Guitar: The Queen Titles by Edgar Cruz

If you're smart enough to be a Queen fan, this is a goldmine. Cruz is a serious talent and an effortless teacher. The music is gorgeous and the arrangements will really give your chops a workout. Turns out Brian May is a big fan of this, too -- definitely a good sign.

Four tracks get featured here. Might not sound like much on paper, but of course that adds up to a huge amount of instruction because the techniques involved get so beautifully complicated. The lineup: Killer Queen, We Are the Champions, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and best of all, Bohemian Rhapsody.



As you can see, the technical toolkit here is heavily classical, skewed towards flamenco and jazz chord voicings. Those are all Very Good Things if you're into exploring the instrument. Just as a riff generator, this material has been a valuable tool even when I'm not focusing on learning whole passages.

VERDICT: 9/10 As a lesson in composition and dynamics, this is hard to beat. Cruz is masterful and this DVD is a gem.

Guitar Artistry in Concert by Ana Vidovic

Musicians, by and large, are a strange species. Very few instructional videos are presented by radiantly beautiful people -- this is one of them. Of course, the fact that Ana Vidovic could make you stop breathing by walking into a room isn't relevant to her skills on guitar. Her skills are superhuman.

The material here is more of a concert than a lesson. However, the DVD is presented by Mel Bay and shot like an instructional video with a steady focus on clearly framing her hands throughout the performance.



VERDICT: 6/10 It's hard not to learn from this, and Vidovic is a stunning artist. For the record, I am keenly aware of my glaring gender bias, yes.

Intense Rock Volume 1 & 2 by Paul Gilbert

Paul Gilbert is a completely hilarious human being. His enthusiasm and energy are on par with a hyperactive 12 year old, and if you want to learn how to shred...this is the encyclopedia. I will be spending years with this. Of course, that's mostly because shredding is a low priority skillset for me.

As a teacher, Gilbert is hit or miss. I have heard many a mammal lament that his precision and casual speed are actively discouraging as hell. Personally, I find it inspirational. It's important to set the bar high if you want to be any f'ing good, right?

Surely hair metal is a rock bottom moment in the collapse of the Western World, but it was also a meritocracy. Shred represented the bleeding horizon of showoff guitar techniques: maximum flash with minimum effort. While it's easy to sneer at the conventions and excesses of the format, remember that it's also COMPLETELY AWESOME. The whole spectrum of sweeping arpeggios, alternate picking, cascading tapping, pentatonic modes, it's all worth interacting with as a player.

#ProTip Thanks to digital video you can slow down playback to get a more comprehensible sense of the high speed contortions involved with Malmsteen pyrotechnics.



VERDICT: 10/10 For what it is, it's the best there is. Paul Gilbert outlines the whole vocabulary for a generation of guitar players.