First Impressions of Steve Vai’s New Guitar TV

Guitar TV went live on the interwebs a week ago, and so far it looks pretty good.

Well I guess you wouldn’t expect something shabby when the founder and CEO is none less than Steve Vai.

The star studded cast also includes experts in many other areas of guitar such as co-creator and COO Andy Alt, and Musicians Institute graduate Robert Shaw as Director of Programming.

One interesting side note is that although Steve instructs a course for Berklee Music – for this new venture he’s much more closely aligned with Musician’s Institute, where he presented the initial launch last week.

The idea for this new channel is to feature legendary guitar performances from the most accomplished guitarists in history, artist interviews, lessons, live broadcasts, and more.

So far all the commentary on Facebook and Twitter has been largely positive, and after looking through some of the videos already on the site, I can see why.

The official statement on this new venture from Steve Vai was…

“Most people are fascinated to see someone play an instrument in an inspired way. We are moved by witnessing musical brilliance, and it was this notion that led me to purchase the GuitarTV domain 10 years ago. Still to this day, I am deeply satisfied when watching a guitar player who is connected with their art and instrument. GuitarTV helps you tap into that connection, and to each other.”

When you go to the site you’ll see buttons next to each of the six strings on the video player interface. These let you do things such as see more info on the artist via Wikipedia, buy the music from iTunes or Amazon, get the current song’s tablature on Songster.com, buy the featured guitar from Musician’s Friend, and even purchase tickets where available from Ticketmaster.

Although it’s pretty good overall, they will need to fine tune a few minor bugs – for example when I tried to view TABs it launched a pop-up window to display them which was blocked by my browser. On the bright side, when I unblocked it I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could access the TABs rather than get that annoying “Not available in your region” message which is so often the case with legitimate TAB offerings.

It’s also integrated with Twitter and Facebook so you can share comments in real-time, however that’s basically what we’ve come to expect these days, so mainly I’m glad that feature is included because it would have been a bit annoying if they hadn’t done that.

Overall, my conclusion is that the first week has been a very good start, and I recommend you take a look at guitartv.com

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