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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.

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