Steely Glen
I been down so long, down don't bother me.
I wanted to post my impressions of CRGU after having spent about a week with it (8-10 hours or so). For context, I've finished BGU 2.0, own the CAGED Unleashed, 5 Easy Slide Solos, the Theory course and have completed 2 monthly challenges. I really gravitate toward Griff's teaching style, so CRGU was a no-brainer, but in the end, I asked for a refund, which was graciously provided.
I walked through the first 5 rhythm lessons, slowly and painfully, and then skipped around as I was becoming concerned that this course wasn't what I needed. Below are some of my own personal observations. YMMV.
1) First, the positive. The production quality is the best thus far. Great video and audio (well, maybe except for the audio in some of rhythm exercises where Griff is muting everything out) and great user interface below the videos that track what's being played. The manual is also very robust. Lots of material there, for sure. Kudos for taking the A/V to the next level!
2) No fault of Griff's but the copyright laws really do us no favors here. It's really hard to hear a riff in the style of "Smoke on the Water" or a solo in the style of "Stairway to Heaven," but then it's different. Your hand goes grabbing for the actual chord or that iconic riff you've been hearing since you were 10, but that's not what's printed. For me, this was tough. What I really want is to learn the actual riff or the actual solo with Griff's exceptional teaching style walking me through it.
3) As you go through exercise after exercise, lesson after lesson, CRGU begins to feel like one of those "50 Licks" videos that will teach you a bunch of licks/riffs, but with virtually no musical context associated with it. For my personal learning style, it's not very helpful. Again, YMMV. BGU does a great job with the culminating exercises at the end of lessons to cement the learning by imbedding the lesson material into a complete package (like the 6 solos, for example). Those were exercises I could really sink my teeth into, but with CRGU, it seems chock-full of much shorter riffs and solos that didn't give me enough time really "get into" the material. What would've been cool with the rhythm portion of the course is for Griff to design a song-length exercise to have multiple verses, choruses, and a bridge to give you the feel of playing an entire song with a backing track, instead of an 8-second riff repeated 8 times, and then you move on. And to integrate the rhythm and solo sections into song-length exercises, blending the two skills, would've been a huge bonus too.
4) The way the course opens up didn't help me...at all. No introduction (that I could find anyway) and the rhythm section was very theory-laden. Hours worth of material on rhythm that seemed too elementary in some ways and too advanced in other ways. And the lack of backing tracks meant I spent a lot of time strumming to my own counting, not really sure I was doing it right. It was very non-musical and again, non-contextual. In my opinion, some of the more technical aspects of this section would've been more helpful as an appendix. If you ask most students (who don't know how good Griff is as an instructor) to work their way through the first 5 lessons, my guess is that 95% won't make it. It's too dry. They'll either skip to Lesson 6 ("Power Chords") or give up on the course entirely. That may not help CRGU's popularity in the long run.
5) The videos were too long. I believe Lesson 6's video was almost 50 minutes long with 12 exercises in it. It would've been helpful to have those exercises broken out into individual videos that were easier to manage/loop using software. As it was, I had to try to locate a 30-second clip in an almost-hour long video to learn the riffs.
Anyway, I'm a BGU fan through and through, but CRGU wasn't for me, sadly, because I love classic rock and I wanted it to work, but it didn't. Maybe I'll revisit it in the future, who knows. That doesn't mean it won't be "the thing" for you to really rock out and rock on.
I walked through the first 5 rhythm lessons, slowly and painfully, and then skipped around as I was becoming concerned that this course wasn't what I needed. Below are some of my own personal observations. YMMV.
1) First, the positive. The production quality is the best thus far. Great video and audio (well, maybe except for the audio in some of rhythm exercises where Griff is muting everything out) and great user interface below the videos that track what's being played. The manual is also very robust. Lots of material there, for sure. Kudos for taking the A/V to the next level!
2) No fault of Griff's but the copyright laws really do us no favors here. It's really hard to hear a riff in the style of "Smoke on the Water" or a solo in the style of "Stairway to Heaven," but then it's different. Your hand goes grabbing for the actual chord or that iconic riff you've been hearing since you were 10, but that's not what's printed. For me, this was tough. What I really want is to learn the actual riff or the actual solo with Griff's exceptional teaching style walking me through it.
3) As you go through exercise after exercise, lesson after lesson, CRGU begins to feel like one of those "50 Licks" videos that will teach you a bunch of licks/riffs, but with virtually no musical context associated with it. For my personal learning style, it's not very helpful. Again, YMMV. BGU does a great job with the culminating exercises at the end of lessons to cement the learning by imbedding the lesson material into a complete package (like the 6 solos, for example). Those were exercises I could really sink my teeth into, but with CRGU, it seems chock-full of much shorter riffs and solos that didn't give me enough time really "get into" the material. What would've been cool with the rhythm portion of the course is for Griff to design a song-length exercise to have multiple verses, choruses, and a bridge to give you the feel of playing an entire song with a backing track, instead of an 8-second riff repeated 8 times, and then you move on. And to integrate the rhythm and solo sections into song-length exercises, blending the two skills, would've been a huge bonus too.
4) The way the course opens up didn't help me...at all. No introduction (that I could find anyway) and the rhythm section was very theory-laden. Hours worth of material on rhythm that seemed too elementary in some ways and too advanced in other ways. And the lack of backing tracks meant I spent a lot of time strumming to my own counting, not really sure I was doing it right. It was very non-musical and again, non-contextual. In my opinion, some of the more technical aspects of this section would've been more helpful as an appendix. If you ask most students (who don't know how good Griff is as an instructor) to work their way through the first 5 lessons, my guess is that 95% won't make it. It's too dry. They'll either skip to Lesson 6 ("Power Chords") or give up on the course entirely. That may not help CRGU's popularity in the long run.
5) The videos were too long. I believe Lesson 6's video was almost 50 minutes long with 12 exercises in it. It would've been helpful to have those exercises broken out into individual videos that were easier to manage/loop using software. As it was, I had to try to locate a 30-second clip in an almost-hour long video to learn the riffs.
Anyway, I'm a BGU fan through and through, but CRGU wasn't for me, sadly, because I love classic rock and I wanted it to work, but it didn't. Maybe I'll revisit it in the future, who knows. That doesn't mean it won't be "the thing" for you to really rock out and rock on.