Oz Noy

He’s one of the most incisively inventive players working today, welding jazz to jagged blues with quicksilver deftness of touch. We join Oz for a rut-breaking lesson...

- David Mead

Apart from being one of the most fearsomely talented jazz-fusion guitarists around, Oz Noy is also a dedicated teacher, having authored his own online guitar course – called Twisted Guitar – via the Musicians’ Institute in Hollywood, LA. As you will see from our published excerpts in the following pages, it’s not exactly for the faint of heart. The theory behind it is embedded in jazz, which, Oz insists, is the only way to shore up the walls of your musical knowledge base enough to handle anything the current music scene can throw your way. If you want to know the get-out-of-jailfree scales that will save your reputation from coming to harm at anywhere from the local open-mic jam to the world’s top studios, Oz has the answer.

He’s also fairly sure about where many guitarists can take a wrong turn: “The main problem with teaching guitar today is YouTube. People try to take shortcuts and there are no shortcuts studying music…” he tells us during our conversation. “I think 90 per cent of the stuff on YouTube is crap – it’s deceiving. It’s not the right stuff that you need to learn and I have tons of students that come to me and I can see that they try to take the shortcuts and I tell them, ‘This ain’t gonna work, you’re not going to get where you want to with this.’”

Where can aspiring players who wish to learn from an online source go, assured that they are learning the right stuff?