I started playing guitar in the mid '90s, and was lucky enough to have some instructional tapes, despite them having what I remember to be a pretty high price in general. Nowadays many of these can be found online (maybe don’t link anything), but what I’m really curious about is if you have any favorites, lessons which really impacted your playing.
For me, they are Tony MacAlpine’s Shrapnel University tape, which was my first exposure to shred guitar, and Marty Friedman’s Exotic Metal Guitar, which influenced my phrasing. Other important ones were Petrucci’s Rock Discipline, of course, MAB’s Speed Kills, and Reb Beach’s (which kicked off a long tapping phase).
I had EJ, Yngwie, Al Di, MAB, Rock Discipline, Intense Rock, a couple Rusty Cooley chops from hell (those were dvds actually), Gamble chop builder.
Prior to any of those though were some acoustic fingerstyle stuff from Chet Atkins and Phil Keaggy.
My favorites were Chet, because it exposed his full style from learning his tunes. Plus he was such a gentleman of a teacher. After that probably the Rock Discipline because it inspired me to pursue the virtuoso stuff in an organized manner. “Pursue” being the operative word.
I also had EJ, but I was too METAL at that point to appreciate it. Intense Rock II and Terrifying Guitar Trip were the Gilbert tapes I had, and I also had a bootleg copy of the Steve Morse instructionals, thanks to my first guitar teacher. lol
For any Long Island peeps, there used to be (still is?) a yearly guitar show at Five Towns College, which was where I got a lot of this stuff - it was always in May right around my birthday, so my dad would take me and get whatever.
Definitely a cool one from what I recall, from a little before Greg went all in on fusion. If I remember right, it also had some guy pretending to be that guy from Taxi in it (edit: this happens immediately) which was already a dated reference back then. lol Greg has awesome tapping ideas, though - I’ll rewatch this one.
Definitely the Michael Lee Firkins video. When it first got it, I was expecting to see a shredding intro, but instead it was him playing some crazy faux slide stuff. I had never heard anything like it before and I watched it over and over.
Hi, I just wanted to say thanks for posting about this. I have been working out of the PDF of the book for this for a while now, but I had never seen the video. I just searched and found it on Youtube. Amazing. And yes the 5678/5768 etc. section is awesome. Thanks again.
All those Texas boys from that time period (like late '90s) were beasts: they’d heard the classic shred material, but also Shawn Lane. haha Rusty, Brett and Scott Stine, Derek Taylor, Eddie Head…
The coolest one: Gambale’s Monster Licks and Speed Picking. I’m never playing any of that but it’s really entertaining to see him do his thing.
The one that really helped me: REH’s Beginner Series Rock Guitar steps 1 & 2 by Nick Nolan. Almost my entire blues rock vocabulary comes from those tapes and my family knows the entire set of licks by memory.
Greg Howe - Guitar Lesson - Hot Licks REH HD 
