This has been an interesting read, and thanks @Steely Glen for putting so much thought into your review of it, I know a lot of people will get a lot out of that.
I'll answer to a couple of points (or rather, explain/expand on them) just so you know where I'm coming from in case it helps you make the decision for yourself (with tomorrow being the end of the sale and all...)
1 - The first 5 lessons on counting and rhythm are the lessons I always wanted to do, and as mentioned would absolutely include with every course that goes out the door if I had known how to do that from a technical standpoint before now.
Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the #1 (by a LARGE margin) thing that I hear from frustrated students is timing related. When they can't play something, it's because they don't know when, not that they don't know how. It happens every time and it fixes it every time.
So yes, those first few lessons are very counting heavy, and that continues throughout, though it gets less and less as the course progresses, unless the rhythm is tricky and then I count it pretty deliberately.
2 - The riffs are short and close to "real" riffs and songs. Yes, there are copyright issues. With YouTube, Google has worked things out with copyright owners and the videos are basically like songs on the radio now. That's why they ALL have ads on them, that ad revenue goes to the copyright holders now (well, a portion of it.)
However, the copyright involved with teaching a song note-for-note, and the copyright involved (or rather, the license involved) for actually printing the TAB is totally different.
It's not that I can't afford the license, it's that I can't afford the lawyers to navigate it all and tell me what to do and make the arrangements. It's ridiculous how complex that is. Notice that you see things like "Guitar Tab White Pages" published by Hal Leonard? Guess who owns the rights to print almost all the sheet music on the planet? Guess who I have to pay to get permission to print sheet music? Guess who isn't all that inclined to make that cheap and help me compete with them?
So it's a pain, and it's expensive.
But probably the real reason, even more than that, is that I want you to develop your ear and your ability to learn songs on your own. The skills required and the chord shapes and rhythmic constructs required to play "Smoke On The Water" are the exact same as the ones you need to play example 6-1. If you learn them, and then you looked up the TAB for "Smoke On The Water," it should make perfect sense and you should be able to learn it easily.
If you learn solo 3, which is very much in the style of "Comfortably Numb," and then you wanted to learn the "real" solo for "Comfortably Numb," you would have all the skills you needed to learn that.
And if you tried to learn it by ear, you would have already heard yourself play all of the patterns and ideas in the actual solo, so you could probably figure it out for yourself if you had assimilated the solo in CRGU.
3 - The overlap question, and that really depends on how much you really have learned from the other courses. The pentatonic and blues scales are covered in several of my courses, but that's because they come up a lot. I suppose at some point I could just teach those scales by themselves in one course and reference them in others, but I like to try and teach them in the musical context they are going to be used in.
But you won't find any of the riffs in the rhythm section or any of the solo in the lead section in any other course. So while at first I thought there would be a lot of overlap, when I really looked at it after it was all finished, I was surprised at how little overlap there actually was, despite chords and scales not changing from style to style.
So hopefully with my explanation and the reviews above, anyone reading this will get a good indication of whether or not it's good for them. And also hopefully you can see that the refund is easy if you don't like it so you don't have anything to worry about in that way either.
I'll answer to a couple of points (or rather, explain/expand on them) just so you know where I'm coming from in case it helps you make the decision for yourself (with tomorrow being the end of the sale and all...)
1 - The first 5 lessons on counting and rhythm are the lessons I always wanted to do, and as mentioned would absolutely include with every course that goes out the door if I had known how to do that from a technical standpoint before now.
Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the #1 (by a LARGE margin) thing that I hear from frustrated students is timing related. When they can't play something, it's because they don't know when, not that they don't know how. It happens every time and it fixes it every time.
So yes, those first few lessons are very counting heavy, and that continues throughout, though it gets less and less as the course progresses, unless the rhythm is tricky and then I count it pretty deliberately.
2 - The riffs are short and close to "real" riffs and songs. Yes, there are copyright issues. With YouTube, Google has worked things out with copyright owners and the videos are basically like songs on the radio now. That's why they ALL have ads on them, that ad revenue goes to the copyright holders now (well, a portion of it.)
However, the copyright involved with teaching a song note-for-note, and the copyright involved (or rather, the license involved) for actually printing the TAB is totally different.
It's not that I can't afford the license, it's that I can't afford the lawyers to navigate it all and tell me what to do and make the arrangements. It's ridiculous how complex that is. Notice that you see things like "Guitar Tab White Pages" published by Hal Leonard? Guess who owns the rights to print almost all the sheet music on the planet? Guess who I have to pay to get permission to print sheet music? Guess who isn't all that inclined to make that cheap and help me compete with them?
So it's a pain, and it's expensive.
But probably the real reason, even more than that, is that I want you to develop your ear and your ability to learn songs on your own. The skills required and the chord shapes and rhythmic constructs required to play "Smoke On The Water" are the exact same as the ones you need to play example 6-1. If you learn them, and then you looked up the TAB for "Smoke On The Water," it should make perfect sense and you should be able to learn it easily.
If you learn solo 3, which is very much in the style of "Comfortably Numb," and then you wanted to learn the "real" solo for "Comfortably Numb," you would have all the skills you needed to learn that.
And if you tried to learn it by ear, you would have already heard yourself play all of the patterns and ideas in the actual solo, so you could probably figure it out for yourself if you had assimilated the solo in CRGU.
3 - The overlap question, and that really depends on how much you really have learned from the other courses. The pentatonic and blues scales are covered in several of my courses, but that's because they come up a lot. I suppose at some point I could just teach those scales by themselves in one course and reference them in others, but I like to try and teach them in the musical context they are going to be used in.
But you won't find any of the riffs in the rhythm section or any of the solo in the lead section in any other course. So while at first I thought there would be a lot of overlap, when I really looked at it after it was all finished, I was surprised at how little overlap there actually was, despite chords and scales not changing from style to style.
So hopefully with my explanation and the reviews above, anyone reading this will get a good indication of whether or not it's good for them. And also hopefully you can see that the refund is easy if you don't like it so you don't have anything to worry about in that way either.