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This instructional DVD from Rock House Method is subtitled “X-Treme Strength & Technique Training“ that should give you some indication about the content of this video. The instructor is John McCarthy who is one of the founders of Rock House Method and has developed a set of 3 exercise routines designed to build picking and left hand fingering speed and accuracy as well as finger strength and dexterity.

Routine 1 begins with some simple alternate picking exercises and hammer-on and pull-off examples and move on to some more difficult exercises that help to isolate all of your left hand fingers and fingering combinations. The routine finishes with an alternate picked Minor Pentatonic pattern which is then transposed across the 5 Pentatonic patterns which is also a useful pentatonic scale memorising exercise.

Routine 2 expands on the first starting with more advanced picking patterns and scale exercises. John also has a couple of tricky exercises named “The Killer” and “Finger Crusher” the first is a chromatic pattern to get your fingers used to crossing strings using an awkward fingering pattern which helps build strength and coordination and the “Finger Crusher” moves a pentatonic pattern 2 strings at a time up and down the neck. There are also exercises that just isolate your 3rd and 4th left hand fingers which is something most guitarists need to do from time to time.

Routine 3 takes the first 2 lessons a step further with advanced legato runs, incorporating open strings into patterns and string skipping pentatonic licks. There is also a monster exercise called simply the “Classical Exercise” which brings together all of the exercises into something more musical, don’t worry all of these exercises are included in a tab booklet with the DVD.

This DVD is meant to apply to players of all levels but I think that Beginner to Intermediate players will find this DVD the most useful, advanced players will already know a lot of these exercises or will create some themselves. “Rock House Method - Hands Of Steel“ is available through RockHouseMethod.com for $19.99 but at the time of writing is priced at $16.99 which is a pretty reasonable price.

As with all Rock House Method DVD’s the purchase also enables access to the online resources for each DVD as well as the forums and software such as a guitar tuner and metronome.

I have been playing a couple of tracks recently one to help my alternate picking the other to help my phrasing, the tracks are “Curse of Castle Dragon“ by Paul Gilbert and “Gone“ by Andy Timmons. Whilst learning these tracks I came across a couple of great string skipping licks that I thought would make good exercises. I have recorded both examples played at a slow speed follow by the correct tempo. The first example is from “Gone“, I have included the actual lick on the video immediately after the fast version (it is at 0:45). As you can hear from my example I still haven’t got it down perfectly yet but that is what examples like this are for, increasing your coordination and accuracy.

If you want to make this even harder you might want to try alternate picking the entire example, start very slowly and increase the tempo as you get comfortable with it.

The second example is a string skipped arpeggio with a tapped slide, not a particularly easy example to master but fun! You might have a bit of difficulty at first with the stretch so break it down into sections, try first working on the first 3 notes making sure your pull-offs are equally timed and clear, then move on to playing the first 6 notes over and over etc. Finally work up to playing the arpeggio without the tapping slide and then once you are comfortable introduce the tapping.

I have been playing guitar now for 20 years so I can barely remember those initial exciting months of learning guitar and having taught kids when I was 16-18 have a good understanding of just how difficult it is to be an effective teacher. What John McCarthy has done for Rock House Method is to create a 3 part DVD series called “Learn Rock Guitar“ that takes you through the various stages of development with enough material for you to expand on in your own time and take you from Beginner to Intermediate and finally to the Advanced DVD.

As you would probably expect the first DVD concentrates on how to hold a pick, how to fret a note and then how to play the basic open major and minor chords and some simple strumming patterns and progressions. That alone is enough to keep most beginners going for a while but John also moves on to Barre chords, Pentatonic scales and finger exercises to build up finger strength. Toward the end of the DVD John combines all of this into a Rock rhythm and solo. This is a great foundation video to help complete beginners get started and also to start understanding how music works, music theory isn’t an easy subject to comprehend and this video helps to ease the student in without going into so much detail as to confuse them.

The intermediate DVD expands on the first with more Pentatonic patterns and exercises and includes Hammer-ons and Pull-offs and introduces string bending exercises using the Minor Pentatonic scale. John also expands the students Chord vocabulary and works on some rhythmic variations which gives the student a chance to use these chords and rhythms to start experimenting on their own. Also on this DVD are some workout exercises which include “The Killer” and “The Finger Crusher” which as you would expect combine some tricky finger combinations and alternate picking moving up and down the fretboard. While not the most exciting things to play they are really helpful to build up spee, accuracy and dexterity, in fact these exercises are useful to advanced guitar players too. This video also introduces some arpeggios, advanced lead lines including 2 handed tapping and some more scales such as the Blues and Natural Minor scales. Probably the most exciting part of this video for beginners is that there are 2 examples to learn of actual Rock songs, the rhythm and intro to Guns ‘N Roses classic track “Sweet Child ‘O Mine” and Metallica’s “Fade To Black” which gives the Student something to work towards, I remember how excited I was when I could finally play along to one of my favourite rock tracks! (I think it was “Can I Play With Madness” by the way).

The 3rd and final DVD in the series as you would expect expands further on the first 2 with pentatonic and minor scale examples that span the entire fretboard which help the students to break out of position when improvising. John also expands on the two handed tapping technique by providing a couple of Eddie Van Halen examples, Eruption and Hot For Teacher which are probably two of the best examples for learning tapping in my opinion. He moves on to show how to merge tapping and the scales you have already learned to play tapped pentatonics. There are more strengthening exercises, arpeggios and hammer-on and pull-off licks to help develop your technique as well as a couple of Mozart Sonatas and to finish off the solo from “Mr Crowley” by Ozzy Osbourne (played by Randy Rhoads).

As a bonus each DVD features a 20 minute interview with John where he talks about how you can develop as a player, how to get started playing with other people and some background into John’s music.

As a learning guitarist you would be best to buy all 3 in the series to get a good head start to your guitar playing, then you can move on to more advanced videos from some of your favourite rock and metal guitarists to help take you to the next level. This series would certainly make a nice Christmas present to someone who may be starting out playing guitar.

Check out http://rockhousemethod.com for more information and to purchase a DVD online.

I’ve probably said this before so stop me if I have, oh you can’t ah well, when I started playing guitar waaaaaay back in the late 80’s instructional videos were on VHS cassettes which meant it was a linear experience. You had a certain amount of control such as slow motion playback, rewind and fast forward and of course pause but the more you did all this the more the tape wore out and you ended up with noise lines all over the picture! Also the audio quality was pretty questionable to start with compared with today’s standards and that also deteriorated if you kept watching the tape over and over! These days of course instructional DVDs have much more to offer and Rock House Method have created some great products for Rock and Metal guitarists from beginner to advanced. I will cover some of the other titles in the coming weeks but I’d like to start with the DVD that caught my attention recently “Fretboard Autopsy“ by shredmeister Rusty Cooley.

Fretboard Autopsy is a 2 DVD series that can be purchased separately or if you would like to save a few bucks as a package deal in the Rock House Method online store, you will save $15 buying both at the same time. So what is it? Well as the title suggests Rusty has created a complete tutorial to help you visualise the fretboard by first playing all 7 modes moving up the fretboard (which is also included in a tab booklet inside the DVD cover) and then by creating patterns that overlap the different 3 note per string mode patterns to help you see the relationships. Now don’t expect this series to be an in-depth tutorial on Rusty’s incredible speed shredding style, you do get to see a lot of his techniques as he plays the examples up to speed (and I mean speed!) but he doesn’t dwell on the technical points of his playing, this video is purely mode examples to help you get out of the box positions. Once he has finished going through all the modes Rusty introduces some patterns which use 12 notes in the root position and then shift up to the next position for the next 12 notes. Now you could quite easily play these examples and not realise what you have just done but Rusty keeps emphasising how you are shifting up and using notes from the next mode position again to help you visualise the modal patterns and make you realise how easy it is to move around the fretboard. Another set of patterns Rusty uses are the modes minus the 7th which creates a set of repeated 6 note (3 notes per string) patterns which are simple to memorise and have you leaping from the 3rd fret on the bottom E to the 12th fret on the top E without having to change your fingering. I wish someone had shown me these simple ideas when I was starting out it would have helped me get out of my pentatonic rut when it was time to improvise!

The second DVD takes the pattern based ideas further although there does seem to be quite a lot of overlapping content that is the same which I found a bit weird especially if you had bought the 2 DVDs separately. Anyway once you get past the repeated section there are some cool reverse linear patterns which I think every guitarist would find very useful and certainly help you move around the fretboard with much more confidence. These DVDs are no quick fix, as with any lesson it is a matter of digesting the material and then committing it to memory in every possible position, something I hate doing but I really need to! If you were to take everything on board in these videos you would have a pretty solid arsenal of patterns to use in your improvisations or riff writing.

UPDATE: Joe from Rock House Method updated me on why there is some overlapping content:
There are just a few things that purposely overlap, they have to just in case someone only purchased level 2, they must have the foundation for all the patterns and sequences in both. If someone just purchased level 1 or level 2 they would need this as the building blocks for each program.
Thanks for the update Joe, that makes sense.

Another nice feature of the DVDs are the extras that come as part of the package. First of all you get a 30 minute interview with Rusty Cooley, unfortunately both DVDs contain the same interview but it is very interesting and gives you some insight into Rusty’s influences and how he focussed on practice at an early age. At the end of the 1st DVD Rusty takes you through his gear and explains how he designed his signature RC7G 7 string Dean guitar too. You also get a Rusty Cooley music video to watch and you also get access to the Rock House Method online members area where you can access the forums, extra tabs, backing tracks and applications to help you out like a metronome and a guitar tuner.

These DVDs are aimed at guitarists with some theory knowledge you should know what modes are if you are to fully appreciate this course but it is not essential it may even teach you everything you need to know about modes in the process of watching. I think Intermediate and Advanced players would both benefit from this excellent series, Rusty is a good teacher who instructs clearly and concisely which, considering he is self taught shows how much of a natural musician he is. The only thing I find annoying is that Rusty has his guitar tuned down a half step for both videos, which although he explains and gives you the tuning notes for, if you are like me and have a floyd rose style trem you aren’t going to want to tune down to play along to the examples. I don’t really understand why he didn’t have his guitar setup to standard tuning just for the video.

Rock House Method
Rusty Cooley Official Site

Rock House Method issued a press release last week stating that the legendary Metal and Jazz master Alex Skolnick and Brazillian sensation Kiko Loureiro have signed up to do Instruction DVD’s too!

This week I was listening to Megadeth’s ‘Countdown to Extinction‘ and it suddenly struck me that Marty Friedman’s solo in the track ‘Sweating Bullets’ was almost a technical exercise covering a few techniques which I thought was worth sharing.

UPDATE: Reader Yann pointed out that this solo was actually played by Dave Mustaine which when you think about it makes much more sense. Thanks for the info Yann!

As you can see I recorded a video of myself playing the solo using a backing track I found on guitarbt.com and I have tabbed a few examples that I thought would be useful for both beginners and advanced players. The first example is the chromatic run staring at 0:23 and ending around 0:28 in the video above. This is a great alternate picking exercise and you need to be very precise with your left and right hand coordination. For beginners this is a great exercise as I always find descending runs more tricky than ascending. Use a metronome or if you have Guitar Pro download the tab for this song and use the trainer feature which I set to start at 50% of the actual tempo and each loop it automatically increments slightly giving you a chance to build up speed for the lick. If not use a metronome, start slowly (80bpm maybe) and concentrate on playing every note with a quick clean attack, try to keep your left hand relaxed. I have tabbed the example as triplets but you can still think of them as 3 sets of 4. If you’re confused just forget the actual notation and concentrate on the tab and playing the 4 notes per string, then as you get more comfortable work up to quaver triplets at 165bpm as per the record. The tab for this example is below:

Example 1

The 2nd lick I have tabbed is the palm muted ascending triplets that immediately follow Example 1. Again this lick uses alternate picking starting with a downstroke and ends with a pull-off (G-F-E) and ending on a crotchet F ready for the final example. Use your palm to mute the strings until the final 2 beats of the second bar (the pull-off lick).

Example 2

The 3rd and final lick is the section that follows Example 2. This part is a really great exercise in hammer-ons and pull-offs. The entire lick except for the final beat of the last bar are all quaver triplets and you need to focus on keeping these consistent and the hammer-ons and pull-offs smooth. The 1st and 3rd bars are the same pattern moved down a string but pay attention to the pattern in the 2nd bar which is a little trickier in a descending form. The final bar is a simple alternate picked descending pentatonic run.

Example 3

I hope you enjoyed this departure from my usual posts to share a few playing tips and tricks, if you want more like this why not use the feedback tab and add an item to my UserVoice Feedback forum.

If you want to buy the official TAB book for ‘Countdown To Extinction’ I have included a product link below.