Gibson’s Learn & Master Guitar
Ten discs, fourteen hours, shot and edited start to finish. 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. Still sold today.
- 10 discs, 14 hours
- 100,000+ students reached
- Gold Player’s Choice Award
- Telly Award winning series
What it was
A complete guitar course in a box, produced across 2005 and 2006 for Legacy Learning Systems under the Gibson name, with Steve Krenz teaching on camera. Ten DVDs, fourteen hours of instruction, plus a workbook and play-along material. Bought by people who wanted to learn guitar at home and had no teacher within driving distance.
The course is still on sale twenty years later, and it has grown: the version Legacy ships now runs to twenty discs and more than forty hours. Those are their numbers for the current edition, not mine. The ten discs and fourteen hours above are the ones I shot.
It reached more than 100,000 students worldwide, and won the Acoustic Guitar Player’s Choice Gold Award and a Telly Award for educational video production. I was the video producer on the entire project, start to finish: shot it, edited it, post-produced it. Legacy Learning Systems submitted it for the Telly and so Legacy technically holds the award, which is the ordinary way that works and is worth stating plainly rather than leaving either half of it out.
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 actually copy it. Pacing an explanation for the slowest person likely to be watching, not the fastest. Never letting the camera show something the viewer hasn’t been taught to see yet. Every instructional thing I've made since, the fifty-odd courses, two books, two GRAMMY Foundation curricula, came out of learning that here first. On a guitar course. In a box.
Related
Multi-Platinum.com took the same idea online. The LANDR course is the current-day version of it.
Wondering which half of your own work is at risk?
Ten questions about how you actually get paid, and my honest read on what's exposed and what isn't. No score, because a score would be a number I made up.