Tim Huffman Talks about Online Guitar Instruction

by Rick Landers.

Tim Huffman, co-founder and CEO/President, and his team at iVideosongs are pushing the guitar lesson envelope in a major way. The company has developed a viable web-based formula for teaching all levels of guitar skills and songs to aspiring and working musicians.

Although we’ve all seen artist-developed guitar instructional videos, they run the full length of the quality spectrum. Some are very good, but many are amateurish at best and of little value.

Huffman brings his own musical background to the game as a 1983 Grammy-nominated recording artist who has played with members of Kansas, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Atlanta Rhythm Section and other known groups. His hard-won business acumen is drawn from 25 years of building his own set list of successful businesses, as well as producing the 1997 award-winning Blues Guitar Explorer instructional video.

The iVideosongs team has smartly pulled together a workable template for developing strong content and easily understandable instruction, taught by expert musicians who are chosen to teach based on their presentation strengths.

A premium highlight of the iVideosongs catalog is the growing list of original artists who instruct on the songs that made them famous. Musicians like Scotty Moore [The Elvis Presley Band], Graham Nash [Crosby, Stills and Nash], John Oates (Hall and Oates], Alex Lifeson [Rush], Jon Foreman [Switchfoot] and others are interviewed and later show viewers exactly how they play one or more of their hits. From a guitarist’s perspective, the celebrity guitarists’ instruction is both authentic to the note and measure by measure, inspiring.

For such celebrated working musicians to take the time to figure out all the logistics, financial implications, and instructional development requirements to make a teaching video is a formidable challenge. Many simply can’t find the time to get around to producing their own instructional videos. And when they do, the oftentimes haphazard nature of the final product can be disappointing, as well as a waste of time and money for everyone.

iVideosongs takes a huge burden off musicians, making life a lot easier by asking them to show up, play and instruct without all the other time consuming hassles.

Each video in the company's inventory is shot in hi-definition and can be dumped into an iPod, a personal computer or other media device. Along with a master performance to check progress in learning the songs, the videos include tablature and point-by-point instruction that make it easy to study each song's structure and playability. The beauty of any video instruction is the ability to repeatedly watch the video, slow it down or freeze-frame key spots that are more difficult to learn. By coupling all of these features with the original artists and other guitarists who are involved with some of the teaching, iVideosongs has managed to make learning guitar pretty compelling and just plain fun.

With a global music instrument market of over $18 billion a year and an estimated 54% of American families having some family member owning a musical instrument, it's obvious that there can be big dividends derived from moving music instruction into the online media arena and polishing it to a fine sheen. And since guitars make up the bulk of the market, logic dictates that iVideosongs focus on guitarists is the right one. But, Huffman is also building the company catalog to include instruction in bass guitar, keyboards, drums, and banjo.

The company's Beatles music catalog is represented with a list of tunes such as, “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Blackbird,” “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, “ “The Long and Winding Road,” and other favorites that serve both acoustic and electric guitar players' interests. No Beatle on these, but Giles Martin, Grammy-award winning co-producer of the Beatles Love CD, talks about the songs based on both his and his famous father’s (Sir George Martin, CBE) knowledgeable experience with the Beatles.

Modern Guitars spoke with Tim about the people and the ideas behind the company’s music instructional videos.

Rick Landers: I watched your video interview with Giles Martin, who produced the Beatles' Love album that segued into a guitar lesson for “A Hard Day’s Night.” The concept of linking one of the people involved with the production, writing or playing of the music looks like a winning combination. How did this idea evolve?

Tim Huffman: I guess, in a nutshell, it kind of came down to the idea of access. I had the good fortune twenty-five years ago to get nominated for a Grammy and a lifetime working in the music business. And it was such an amazing educational experience, unlike anything I’d experienced in college or tutorials. Just the idea of watching and being close to these masters is so powerful that we said, "Hey, how could we take that unusual access that not many people have and make it available to anybody, anywhere anytime?"

So, that was kind of the birth of it. It was just about connecting great artists and great songs with John Q. That’s what really drove the notion of having artists involved.

You know, in the beginning there was a cluster of them all right in a row. If my memory serves me, I believe it was Matt Scannell from Vertical Horizon, Jim Messina from Loggins and Messina and with Poco, and Tommy Johnson from the Doobies. Those are some of the early guys. And part, or the reason why their titles are not on our site yet, even though they were early in our process, is because when we started out we said, "Hey, when the artist gets done breaking this thing down into verse, chorus, bridge, solo, let’s have them perform it. When they go to perform it, let’s show them perform it in synch with the master track."

At the time, we were in the process of executing master agreements with all the publishers. We were headed down the same way with the labels. So, the first few shoots that we did we had these guys doing the final performance to the master. What we quickly found out, no offense to the labels, but, it was just a hell of a mountain to climb to get something done. Frankly, it was the publishers too when we got to the process of clearing the masters on some of those early guys.

Rick: Your music background includes being nominated for a Grammy?

Tim: I was nominated for a Grammy in 1983. They have them the following February, so that was the year. It was the year when Michael Jackson’s Thriller swept. So, if you can think that far back, I was in an Atlanta-based band and we got nominated as best band or duo.

So, it was kind of ironic. I was 22 years old. My wife and I had just bought a house the week before and, frankly, we were too poor to get it up for the ticket, tux, dress and the hotel. So, we didn’t go. I mean, they send you a plaque and all that cool stuff. But, at this award that just happened in February [2008], we did go. It was so cool because Giles and his dad [George Martin] won two Grammys for Love. We were able to enjoy the whole process that we missed 25 years ago.

Giles didn’t do any press really around the Grammy’s, even for Capitol, the record label that released the Love CD. But, he spent two hours with us the morning after the Grammys, just doing press. And when the interview started to slide a little celebrity, he’d bring it back to, “This is why I think it’s important to the Beatles' legacy and their catalog," that their titles be taught accurately and shot in HD [High Definition] etcetera. So, this go around it was fun. It was the 50th awards in February.

Rick: During his interview, Giles [Martin] seemed like a pretty humble person, especially given that he was the key guy working on the Beatles’ Love CD.

Tim: Yeah, he really is, Rick, I mean he totally gets the fact who his Dad is. So, he feels the weight of everything coming out of his mouth to be as accurate as it can be. There are so many Beatles aficionados just waiting to say, “Hey, Blackbird wasn’t recorded on the fourteenth, it was the twelfth.”

But, he’s just a really genuine humble guy, an extremely talented guy, a great musician, a great producer and pretty much is the heir to the throne of the catalog in terms of future projects and where they’re going. In fact, he shared so many cool stories. One of them was, Paul [McCartney] told him that there was nobody in the world more knowledgeable of the catalog than Giles, because he spent three years leading up the project. And since he was the only one going through all of the original four tracks and creating new Pro-Tools digital masters of them.

When the CD came out in the '80s they took out that original master recording and dumped it into digital. In the case of what Giles did, he went down track- by- track. That’s part of the reason Love sounds the way it does.

Rick: One of the toughest aspects of pulling all of this interview-music combination together must be the negotiated legalities for copyright, but, also the logistics of getting to the artist and finding the time to make the videos. Can you give us an example or two on how your team pulls this together and the challenges you face in pulling this off?

Tim: Sure. Well, you really hit a nerve, Rick. That’s one of the great challenges, getting the artists involved. And so it started with kind of a Rolodex of the people I knew and the people on our team knew. We also have five music instrument companies that are just awesome musical instrument partners; PRS, Taylor Guitars, Mesa-Boogie, D’Addario and Roland. In each of those cases, they have a number of artists involved and they were quite helpful making introductions with us. So, we many times connected personally with the artists first. That was pretty powerful.

Artists tend to be intuitive and know right away whether they want to do it or not. And then it makes it much easier to get the project rolling. It sort of comes down to how you catch them and where. In our case it was really a litany of venues. We’ve got a facility here in Atlanta, so we catch people the best we can here. But, in many cases it was in the artist’s home. A lot of them have home studios.

We’ve rented studios, like when we did Russ Kunkel, the great drummer. He did “Doctor My Eyes” with Jackson Browne. We shot it in Jackson’s studio in Santa Monica. In some cases it was in a hotel room or in a backstage room, which is cool until they start running white noise through the PA system for sound check and when they start checking the kick drum. Then, it gets a little crazy.

So, that’s the kind of the venue and how we got them. And then we were surprised that some of these guys can’t even read music. Yet, they’re monster players. They understand what they’re doing with their hands and they can kind of articulate it. But, it may not be on the highest level of what a Berklee School of Music grad would expect. And yet, they’re just aficionados and what we found is that they are effective at communicating; “This is what I’m thinking about. This is what I’m doing with my hands.” They love the idea of interacting in this way because they don’t’ really get a chance to do it from stage or on a CD. You know, where you peel back the onion and kind of go, “Here’s where I was with the band. Here’s why I wrote this song. Here’s how I get my tone and here’s exactly how I play this lick for lick.”

With older artists there was this legacy appeal. It’s like, Graham Nash is 65 years old. So, for him it was, “I want to leave [this] behind as an accurate representation of my art.” You can watch clips at Woodstock and see Crosby, Stills and Nash play. But, to see him tell the story and then have multiple angles in HD of his hands is another thing.

And then for a lot of newer artists, in a lot of cases, they feel like tab sometimes doesn’t quite catch the nuances of a voicing and they’re not accurate. They love the notion of it being visual in video versus static on a page. They’ll l leverage it as a promotion. They may do two or three hits and then something new that’s on an upcoming album. It becomes a promotional vehicle for them.

Rick: Our readers will quickly want to know two things. Are these guitar lesson videos a good way to learn and how much is this going to cost?

Tim: Sure. You know, it’s really tough to replace a human. That real in-person interaction is really powerful, where a guy says “Hey, I know you want to play a slide lick and you’ve got it on the right finger. But, maybe the angle of your slide isn’t quite right, so you’re getting overtones.” There’s that interactive part that’s real powerful.

The challenge though, honestly Rick, is that you have to remember everything you saw and heard, when you leave. Imagine you got to sit down with Alex Lifeson from Rush. You just happen to be a friend of a friend and he has you over and he shows you how to play "Tom Sawyer." How cool would that be? And you get to ask him any question you want and he tells you all the stuff. You’ve got to remember all of it. What’s beautiful of what were doing, from an archives standpoint, is it’s shot in HD, it’s multiple angles and it’s something you can take with you. There’s no DRM [Digital Rights Management] attached to it. It’s cross-platform and you can put it on your laptop, your phone and you can put it on a flat screen television.

It’s just something that’s there for you to keep chewing on over time. So, if you take a lesson, even if you have a killer teacher, you’re sitting in the back of a music store and you’re going to pay, typically, 50 to 100 bucks an hour for lessons. And it usually takes a few visits to completely work through a song. Then, you might have a few notes scribbled out. You've kind of got it and then you come back to it six months later and it’s like, “Where is it?” It’s not in your head and it’s not on that piece of paper. But, from a cost perspective, it’s not cheap.

In this case for $4.99, which is how much it costs to download sheet music, you can have an HD video presentation by an expert instructor, accurate to the original recording, that includes a backing track that his hands are synched to. You get all the magic of the vocal and the rhythm section, the lyric and everything. Or, for $9.99, you can have a title presented by the original artist and have all those layers of the behind-the-music stuff. So, it’s actually cheaper than taking lessons.

Rick Is there a quick and easy way for viewers to get to various chapters from the screen they're on?

Tim: Yeah. Some people miss this because it’s not real obvious. But, in the QuickTime player in the lower right corner, there’s a pull down menu by chapter. You don’t have to linearly, kind of run through the whole. If you want to noodle and solo you can run to the next chapter.

Rick: Guitar instruction is typically pretty bad in my opinion, unless you get lucky and find an instructor who’s technically competent, cuts out the crap of writing out tabs while you sit and wait and is attentive enough to know when someone’s reached a plateau and can help. What criteria do you use to select the best instructors that will offer students the best return on their investments?

Tim: In general, we have a pretty cool blend of guys. Some of them are from Berklee, some from the Atlanta Institute of Music and some are just seasoned road dogs who are great communicators and really know the craft of teaching.

We’ve got the catalog spread out into three categories of skills. There are beginner titles, intermediate and advanced. But, they’re all done exactly to spec of the original recordings. We didn’t dumb them down. The great thing is, like Johnny Cash’s swan song that’s a cover of the Nine Inch Nails’ song “Hurt,” is only four chords. It’s truly a beginner’s song. And you can play it just like the record, as a beginner

So some of our instructors may have fortes and expertise more in finger style or in the blues or whatever. We sort of map those guys to their sweet spots.

They’re all great communicators. One of the things that comes up occasionally is the, “The hands are beautiful and I can see everything that’s going on. But, I don’t see the guy’s face.”

It’s not that our guys are ugly. [Laughs] It’s that we wanted them to be totally focused on what they were saying and what they were doing with their hands, as opposed to some of the older VHS type instruction that’s a wide shot where he’s hemming and hawing. He’s not instructing, because he’s thinking about entertaining. So, we focused on what they’re doing with their hands and what they’re saying.

On the artists’ shots, obviously, we have more cameras and we take into account that you want to connect with them, look into their eyes and that sort of stuff.

Rick: Who are the key players at iVideosongs and how did you all find one another?

Tim: It’s pretty much a base of guys from here in Atlanta. We took the approach that we’d bootstrap the thing originally from a funding perspective, just a couple of guys.

A guy named Andy Morton, a guy named John Thomas and two other key guys, Aaron Hawthorne and Tim Ricciardi. Another key guy is our financial expert, Charlie Farrahar. We just carved up roles and set out to develop a business model and we’d go through some R&D. We reached a point where we decided to do a private equity raise. We did that and fleshed out the team further and sort of scaled it from there. At a glance, the team is a core group of employees. Then there’s another layer around contractors, who are videographers, editors, audio engineers and session players who float in and out, as needed.

Rick: The main guys were people you knew?

Tim: Yeah, I mean, there definitely was a comradeship that was centric around music and then we layered in the subject area experts from a technology standpoint and from a finance standpoint. The idea, at its core, is about song element. It’s one of the primary differentiators. And, as you know, there are so many parts and pieces of songs out there that are typically inaccurate.

Then there’s the stuff that’s “in the style of” Eric Clapton. But, you rarely ever see any songs out there that are taught accurately, because the great hedge was, frankly, the legalities. And as the digital world exploded it got easier and easier to pirate and harder and harder to do it legally. So, at the same time the music industry was crying foul on pirates, they’re not making it real easy for companies, like ours, to do it well and legally.

When I first got in the music industry 25 years ago, I had an attorney here in Atlanta named Joel Katz, who ended up becoming one of the most successful music lawyers in the world. The firm, Greenburg-Traurig, who represents us now is who Joel is part of. He actually sold his practice here to them. So, Joe was instrumental in helping us climb the legal mountain.

We were able to execute master publishing agreements with every major publisher in the world and many of the secondary publishers. That was real important for us early on in our development. We could do the tutorial stuff, the how to, and so can anybody else, but what’s powerful is when you connect people with songs that they love. And then when they’re trying to learn a certain technique, it sticks to their ribs because it’s in the context of a song. And then, how cool would it be to turn it up one louder and get the guy who originally did it, showing it?

That’s kind of a long story of the evolution. But, that’s how it’s happened.

Rick: How do you decide on the music and artists that you’ll include in the lessons?

Tim: You know it’s a combination of things. One is, we feel real strongly about having a great diversity in the catalog and so, we’re going to have White Stripes, Jet and Fall Out Boy. Then we’re going to have Scotty Moore, Elvis’s original guitar player and Chuck Leavell from the Stones. We’re pretty deliberate about the catalog being deep and wide. And from an artist’s standpoint, it tends to almost reveal itself in the very gracious way that you just did earlier with Adrian [Belew] and Robin [Trower]. People get interested and tell somebody and we kind of go from there.

Rick: Are the lessons limited to guitar lessons or do you venture into piano, bass guitar, and other instruments?

Tim: The catalog is primarily guitar. But, we also have drums, bass, keyboards and banjo, of all things. John McEuen, the great banjo master from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is doing some cool stuff for us that’s on the site. Russ Kunkel, the great session drummer is doing some songs. DJ Fontana, who’s 76 years old and was the original drummer for Elvis, tore apart several of his songs and taught them.

We have Daryl Jones, the bass player from the Rolling Stones, who’s just a monster. And then there’s Chuck Leavell from the Stones, Clapton and the Allman Brothers. Chuck taught “Jessica” by the Allman Brothers, because he played on that originally. And also “Alberta, Alberta,” off the Clapton record, which he played on.

Rick: You were going to add something earlier.

Tim: I was just going to say, John McEuen, besides being an outstanding musician and writer for many, many years, is one funny guy. It's been entertaining just to watch and listen to him.

Rick: One interesting aspect of film making is the “out takes” feature on some DVDs. Have you given any thoughts to adding some of the “behind the scenes” experiences or bloopers?

Tim: We try to incorporate it in the shoot or in the product the best we can, rather than bloopers per se, by asking things like, "Hey, what was one of the funniest damn things that has happened to you while on stage?" Those sorts of things that are interesting. We layer it in the best we can. Out takes and bloopers is a cool idea we haven't done, yet. But, I see the value in it.

Management has approval over the final, as the artist does, and in some cases based on the image and handling of a given artist they are pretty particular about the light that you show them in. But, humor is a huge part of being a musician and the unique way that musicians relate in humor. So, we want to capitalize on that. One of the guys were in pursuit of is Chris Guest, aka Nigel [Tufnel] from Spinal Tap, and we’re tying to see if we can get Chris to present a few of those titles.

Rick: There must be quite a bit of planning to stage the interviews and instruction.

Tim: Yes, there’s definitely a planning phase and template for our instructors. Say they’re playing a D chord in first position. They’ll talk about which finger and which fret on which string. There's a consistency of order for when they talk about a D chord in first position. So, there’s an order to when those things are to be said. There’s definitely a road map for the way we break it down.

Our instructors create the tab and chord grids first for each segment of the song. For an intro at the beginning of that chapter, you’re going to see the tab. If there are chords, you’ll see the chord grids and you can pause and look at it and then go back and look at it, as you want to. But, they create all that in advance of the shoot. Then they kind of walk through the process of layering up each part. When it comes to creating a backing track they’ll be involved in that session, as well.

For the artists' shoots, it will depend a little bit on some of the constraints we have on the venue. But, there are usually three or four cameras. And, although that sounds like a lot, it’s actually a pretty light footprint. You’ve got some lights and laptops and cameras. And we tend to take the artists through the song. Sometimes in reverse order first. They’ll want to do the performance first, just to nail it. And then they’ll break it apart, each piece, and then we get into the interview element of it and put it all together.

Rick: I know you do some of the guitar instruction yourself. Are you involved in most of the shoots?

Tim: In my role as CEO I have a ton of business layers to be responsible for. But, as it relates to artists, almost without exception, I’m on those shoots. And it’s in part just for continuity and it’s easy for me to relate to them as a peer, from a musicians’ stand point. It takes forever to win trust and it takes about one stupid comment to lose it.

So, we have a pretty small crew involved in those. They’re great people and appropriate. Our goal is to make the artist comfortable and to be willing to kind of expose their heart. It’s easy to say that. It’s not necessarily easy to do it. And in some cases an artist will have a question. I mean, they won’t know what the name of a chord is or how to exactly express something. So, we’ll work through each segment. Our team will be really familiar with the piece in advance. We can even jog the memory of the artist in some cases, about some part or some line.

Rick: So, you have a set format for filming.

Tim: Yes. The template that we use is something that I defined. From a scaling perspective, it didn’t make sense for me to be the guy to be on the stool having his hands shot. And of all the things I do, interacting with artists and our team is my favorite thing. It's the most fun.

Rick: If you could use one short phrase to brand iVideosongs, what would it be?

Tim: I guess in a sentence, it would be, "We show you how to play complete songs accurately." And if I was to add to it, I would say, "...by expert instructors and by the original artists who wrote and recorded them."

Related Link
iVideosongs

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