John Petrucci brings you...ROCK DISCIPLINE (a picture thread if the pictures can fit)

First a bio for people who don't know who Frank Gambale is (I didn't):
Frank Gambale is best-known for his fiery work with Chick Corea's Elektric Band. He was a student at the Guitar Institute of Technology while in his early twenties, wrote instructional books, and during 1983-1986, was on the school's faculty. He joined Corea in 1986, has also performed with Steve Smith's Vital Information, and has been a leader on his own rock-oriented dates for JVC. A collaboration with bassist Stu Hamm and drummer Steve Smith was another fruitful venture for Gambale, spawning several discs between the three that became increasingly ambitious as time went by.

OK, the thing about this DVD is that since it's basically an hour long lecture on one subject, it's not really conducive to a play by play the way the Petrucci one is.
Also, Gambale seems an affable, knowledgeable chap who doesn't really deserve or even inspire the kind of ridicule I gave to Petrucci. The post I made above really just applies to the intro, as the rest of it is heavy theory stuff that seems very well researched and thorough, and will actually take a few viewings for me to digest.
I will however, describe what led me to make that previous post:

The DVD opens with some incredibly cheap looking titles. I mean white on blue with no attempt at real graphic design whatsoever.
We then fade in to Frank Gambale playing a bright yellow Ibanez with many stickers on it (the same one shown on the DVD cover).
He is wearing a HOT PINK TWEETY BIRD T-SHIRT TUCKED INTO LEATHER PANTS WITH A BELT. Tweety is flying an airplane and wearing an aviator cap in the shirt picture. This is the kind of shirt that you would get your ass kicked for wearing to school in fourth grade.

It must be said that Gambale is one of the ugliest motherfuckers I have ever seen in my life. It's like Bea Arthur got gangbanged by Lou Reed, Hank Azaria, Johnny Cash and Richard Kline and their semen all magically mixed together and begat this hideous man. His hair is different from the DVD cover, looking rather like...well, Bea Arthur's in Golden Girls with a bad dye job.

So he's standing there playing along to a cheese ballad backing track (surprise!), and the lead lines he's playing wouldn't be out of place in some 80's TV drama theme song. That is to say until he begins shredding. When he does this it comes off so fluid and effortless that it makes Petrucci look like a total fucking pussy. Even more of one I mean. This is a jazz cat we're dealing with here - prog metal dinks can fuck right off.

He's there playing lead guitar to this track, shaking his fat middle-aged hips in this ridiculous getup, making little movements with his mouth that resemble a baby bird chirping for its food, singing along with his guitar line occasionally. THIS GOES ON FOR SIX AND A HALF MINUTES, and he still hasn't said a word. Fade out.

Fade in to Gambale playing a PINBALL MACHINE. He's got three of them lined up against the wall of the music room in what is apparently his house. He loses his ball, we are meant to assume, and then "notices" the camera. He's still wearing the pink Tweety shirt tucked into the leather pants...
"Hi, I'm Frank Gambale! Welcome to my new video!"
He speaks in a HIGH, LILTING AND SLIGHTLY EFFEMINATE AUSTRALIAN ACCENT! I almost lost my shit when he started talking.
"I'm not always working on the guitar or playing guitar, sometimes I'm playing pinball too! It's another one of my loves! Anyway I've just spent the last few months working on a subject for this video that we're gonna do that I think is a really important music subject that most guitar players aren't too clear on. The subject of modes. That's what we're gonna be dealing with right after I get done with this game. So let's get down to it!"
Then he goes back to playing pinball. Fade out.

Fade in to Gambale sitting in front of his recording gear with a HOT PINK Ibanez that does NOT match the hot pink of his tweety bird T-shirt, making the guitar look slightly orange by contrast. At this point the video goes into an intense modal theory lecture for nearly an hour that I'm sure will be of great use to me once I can get my head around it.

The video ends with a clip of him singing and playing one of his songs which sounds quite like Steely Dan. He even sings a bit like Donald Fagan. So, good on him. It's a lot better than Dream Theater.

Jeez. I wonder if Chris DeGarmo ever put one of these out.

They shd perhaps do a noel gallagher one.

BB King is such a gracious and modest person here it will just kill you. He is interviewed by a fawning fanboy Guitar World contributor throughout, and everytime fanboy says something about how great BB is, he just kind of puts his head down and blushes and says, "well...thank you".

The interview segments consist of BB and fanboy sitting down with their guitars, and BB will demonstrate licks and techniques to fanboy's accompaniment, explain where he got this and that idea from, etc. These segments are broken up by performance footage every 20 minutes or so, including a smokin' rendition of "Nobody Loves Me But My Mother".

The thing that really cracks me up about this DVD is that here we have BB King, a musician who is 1000 times more respected than a guy like who Petrucci who's devoted his life to learning every flash bastard technique under the sun could ever dream of being, and he's sitting here going "Well, I'm not actually very good with my fingers..." when attempting (and more or less failing) to demonstrate the old school country blues shuffle, and saying things like "Well, you should learn to play in every position.........of course I never did." This serves as a valuable lesson to anyone who may not know better: You don't have to know all that Berklee/GIT bullshit to be considered a good guitarist, just be yourself and be original and make the best of what you know how to do.
I recommend this DVD to anyone with even a passing interest in guitar.

There's not much to say about "Fretboard Logic" except that the producion values are rock bottom. It looks like something you'd see on Public Access or PBS in the middle of the night. It's basically just some totally nondescript guy running through fretboard memorization stuff like the CAGED sequence etc. and will be valuable to anyone who needs to learn this kind of thing.

If there's anything else of note once I've watched these in full, I'll report back.

Maybe we can change the parenthetical bit in the thread title from (a picture thread if the pictures can fit) to (Guitar DVDs reviewed HERE) or something like that.
I'd encourage anyone else who collects these to post reviews here as well.

I am SO totally buying this one, I didn't even know it existed!
Maybe I'll actually learn to play that Casio sitting in the corner gathering dust.
Fagen is a big time hero for me. Wow.

Wow, oh wow.

* How to turn hours of solitude in a Los Angeles bungalow into 'guitar practice', and thus build up a 'personal style' that makes you sound exactly like every other lonely Angeleno guitarist.
* How to turn outdated riffs, gimmicks and tricks into a 'timeless' system of 'correct playing'.
* How to overcome social isolation in your LA bungalow by arranging meetings with Warner Brothers executives to talk about issuing instructional videos that other lonely Angelinos will watch.
* Dress tips for retirement in Los Angeles.

The essential fallacy of all these videos is the prog rock fallacy: that 'increasingly complex' is 'better'.

"It sets the metronome at 210 or else it gets the hose again."

zzzzzzzzzz

roffle at aaron's post

This the very definition of "funny becuase its true."

Aw come on, Jersey and Staten Island Eye-talians control like half the market on this