Video #4: Paul Gilbert - Silence Followed by a Deafening Roar

This was an instructional guitar DVD with some concert footage at the end. Paul is quite a player, and I love his sense of humor, too. In the introduction to the DVD, he was a wandering samurai in full costume.

There is lots of shredding in this DVD (surprise, surprise) but to get the most out of it, you’d want to have the accompanying tablature booklet, which NetFlix doesn’t send along.

I think his pinky is as long as my index finger. I can’t spread my hand across the fretboard like he does, but it was comforting to know that I can still keep up pretty well with his speed picking exercise. So even though I’m not practicing all the time, at least I have that going for me. Which is nice.

The bonus concert footage of Paul playing in South Korea was fun. In it, he delivered a hilarious song introduction. He read it aloud to the audience in broken Korean from a notebook, where it was probably written down phonetically. The audience roared its approval. Luckily, there was an English translation added at the bottom of the screen. And it went something like this…

“This next song is by Racer X.
It originally had 64,250 notes in it.
Tonight, however, I will play a lot more than that!”