Customer Rating: 
Summary: truly excellent stuff
Comment: I find this vid very interesting ... it seems to suit my style really well; jazz tinted blues and gospel with a psychedelic bias.
It opens everything up for the other guys to solo over, and really makes you look/sound like a funky yet laid back rhythm player.
Excellent stuff. Hiughly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great stuff. Money well spent!
Comment: Just got my copy today and just finished to watch it for the first time. I was a bit worried as a previous reviewer had mentioned that it contained a lot of "Junior stuff". That's not the case.
The teachings in this video can all be applied to club and jam session situation. Trust me, if you play the rythms in there as well or pretty close to Robben's level you won't be kicked out of any jam sessions...
I like the pace of this video. Ford spends a couple of minutes telling people how he got into music, the it is bang, bang, bang. The producers were smart enought to cut all the slack.
In a previous review I destroyed the video set of Paul Gilbert (a shredder) as there is too much goofing and almost no playing, not tab.
That's not the case here.
Also, there is 39 pages of tab that is pretty detailed and accurate. It is important because Ford is an extremely slick rythm. Many people might underestimate him as he is not as explosive as Stevie Ray or Gary Moore in their wildest moment. However, Ford would have had no stress jamming with Stevie and Gary. His rythm is obviously spot on and musical.
Also, Ford is a good teacher. You can see that he cares a lot about music and guitar. It comes across every second.
Finally, Ford uses a Les Paul and a Fender amp so he play with a very basic sound than is not that hard to imitate. I have seen many "blues" DVD's for either rythm or solo where the guys have either some thin heavy metal-like sound or some cosmic studio sounds that you would never hear from the blues great. One guy who is like that is Brad Carlton from True Fire. Carlton is a great studio player but he plays all his blues stuff with an ultra modern sound + he plays too clean. Sounds like Kenny G on guitar. We needs to hear some scratching here and there.
Ford shows a very, very important lesson: it is 95 % in your hands.... it is not the equipment who creates the groove.
It is a perfect fit for the intermediate guitar player that wants to have some serious grooves for jam sessions.
If you want to slow down the DVD (like I do) you can do it with Quicktime or WIndows Media. However, what I do in order to loop the whole thing is that I use AVS to transform my DVD's into a .mov (quicktime) file. THen I open it in a software called "Transcribe!" which allows me to loop and slow down the whole thing.
CHeers!
Customer Rating:
Summary: I was there....
Comment: I got a complimentary copy because I was fortunate enough to be there for the taping of this. Robben is very gracious and committed to teaching what he knows. When I got the end product I was amazed how Don Mock & Co. put together such a coherent and useful workshop. Not that it wasn't before, but the editing made it even better. I picked up alot of great ideas and I would definitely say it improved my playing. It's one I will return to over and over again. I can't say that about all instructional DVDs I own.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: major w
Comment: Robben Ford: this is my second DVD featuring Robben Ford, the other one is named "Back to the Blues," and I am obliged to say that I learned something new to add to my inventory of techniques from viewing each instruction. While I believe this is a "junior" level instruction, there is something of interest to all levels of guitar players. I have been playing the electric guitar for a number of years and am transitioning from rhythm to lead soloing. So, I needed examples with visual aid to build my inventory of note selection and song writing ideas.
This DVD comes with a printable guide to examples and transcriptions discussed by Ford during his presentation. If this is your style of play, you should make this a part of your DVD library.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A new standard has been set!
Comment: First and foremost, Guitar Axis is to be appluaded for this packaging.
Good camera work (one angle seems a little tiny bit fuzzy to me), clear indexing and decent sound quality. But the icing on the cake is the pdf of examples. If you're like me you've suffered thru those litle fold up TAB booklets and probably even lost a few; the TAB/standard notation prints out in (38) 8.5 x 11 " pages!
Top notch content, Ford is just a tremendous talent. More on the jazzy side then gut bucket blues, but many hours/days/weeks or material to learn and digest in this 86 minute video. He seems like a genuinely nice guy as well in his audience interaction. I would like to add a sixth star for the guy in the back of the class (left handed, 345 guitar) who looks like he nodded out in one audience shot. Dude, you're famous!
|
