Gibson’s Learn & Master Guitar
Producer, videographer and editor on a boxed home guitar course that reached more than 100,000 students — made in the years just before online video made this kind of thing look obvious.
- 100,000+ students reached
- Gold Player’s Choice Award
- Telly Award winning series
What it was
A complete guitar course in a box, produced for Legacy Learning Systems under the Gibson name. Video lessons, a workbook, and play-along material — bought by people who wanted to learn guitar at home and had no teacher within driving distance.
It reached more than 100,000 students worldwide. It won the Acoustic Guitar Player’s Choice Gold Award, and the series won a Telly Award for Legacy Learning Systems.
Producing instruction before YouTube
This was made when the only way to send a lesson to a stranger was to press it onto a disc and ship it. That constraint shaped everything. You cannot answer a question. You cannot see the student’s hands. Nobody is going to email you to say that lesson four moved too fast, they are simply going to stop at lesson four and put the box on a shelf.
So the entire craft sits in the shooting and the cutting: framing a fretting hand so a beginner can copy it, pacing an explanation for the slowest person likely to be watching, and never letting the camera show something the viewer has not been taught to see yet. Every instructional thing I have made since — fifty-odd courses, two books, two GRAMMY Foundation curricula — came out of learning that on this.
Related
Multi-Platinum.com took the same idea online. The LANDR course is the current-day version of it.