HUB HILDENBRAND
The Genesis
In the Beginning
The idea of writing a book that truly contains everything essential – the most effective exercises, the deepest insights distilled into one cohesive whole – has accompanied me ever since I began making music.
My entire musical path has been accompanied by this intention. Every fragment of information, every well-phrased thought, every new realization found its way into my notes. I meticulously documented anything that deepened my understanding of music. I worked through countless books on music and related fields, tearing out the pages that mattered and leaving the rest. I gathered insights from my teachers, colleagues, personal transcriptions, YouTube videos – from nearly every source imaginable. Around 500 books have left traces in this work.
Over the years, I began processing and integrating this material. I merged diverse sources in order to approach the core of each subject. Through an ongoing process of refinement, I filtered and distilled until only the essence remained.
A Realization
Originally, my aim was to capture the totality of musical knowledge – truly everything – between two covers. But the deeper I delved, the more the space expanded. What once felt tangible gradually grew into an ever-widening cosmos.
Over time, I understood that completeness was impossible. My process began to shift – from encyclopedic ambition to a personal perspective. I started choosing what truly mattered to me, consciously leaving out fundamentals that had already been widely covered elsewhere. After many detours, the project came back into alignment with myself.
Perhaps this is the greatest artistic task: to find and refine one’s own perspective, rather than striving for completeness. No artist, no teacher, no book can ever encompass the whole. What matters is the authenticity of a voice – and that it may stand among others: part of a rich, human polyphony.
This book holds the core of what has carried, shaped, and inspired my musical path – the essence of many years of searching, learning, and understanding.
ONE Music
From the beginning, I wanted to understand music in its full depth – and at the same time, I searched for a language of my own. This journey opened many doors: I immersed myself in diverse musical cultures and explored the most varied aspects of music.
Through the study of European harmony, American jazz, North Indian classical music, and Turkish Makam, I became increasingly aware of the deep connections between these worlds. A unified understanding of music began to emerge – a complete universe governed by inherent principles that we can only begin to comprehend.
Each musical tradition became a window – a perspective on the whole, a prism through which to see. The more perspectives I embraced, the more my understanding of the one music grew. This approach is reflected throughout the book.
We are all made of the same fabric. As different as our traditions may seem, they emerge from the same inner source. When we open ourselves to the music of other cultures, we do not encounter the unfamiliar – we recognize the familiar in the Other.
YouTube (August 2018 – December 2022)
In August 2018, I launched the YouTube channel Guitar Academia – as a workspace where I could organize, review, and reformulate the material I had gathered over decades.
Publishing a new video each week gave me a clear structure. At the heart of every episode was a PDF that systematically explored a topic. This forced me to condense scattered notes, clarify concepts, examine connections, let go of excess – and shape my archive into a coherent form.
The video recordings then gave me the opportunity to present the PDF’s content in a living, improvisational format. Beyond simply explaining the written material, I deliberately left space for spontaneous thoughts, associations, and lateral connections.
Speaking aloud – in dialogue with a virtual counterpart – created a vital complement to the written work. Many insights only came to me while speaking, or were reawakened in the act of explaining.
By December 2022, this process had resulted in 750 pages of PDF material and 230 accompanying video lessons – a body of work that conveys my musical understanding in its depth, nuance, and authenticity.
The Advanced Guitar Book
The PDFs and videos developed over those four years were no longer meant to exist as isolated contributions. They needed to be brought into context, organized thematically, structured and distilled.
This led to the creation of the Advanced Guitar Book – a comprehensive hybrid method: 750 pages, arranged in nine chapters, accompanied by 230 explanatory and deepening video lessons.
I initially wrote this book for myself. It was my way of learning – of understanding, clarifying, and organizing. Everything that moved me musically or gave me pause, I wanted to document and make tangible. Over three decades, I gathered, selected, and shaped material – from conversations, books, lessons, videos, and my own experience. A personal archive emerged. Not a neutral overview, but a distilled essence. This book reflects how I understand music – and how I share that understanding in my own way.
Looking Ahead: A Physical Book – My Life’s Work
A printed edition has long been a vision of mine – perhaps the next step on this path. To distill everything gathered in the PDFs and videos into a tangible, self-contained book.
Such a project would require a great deal of time. My life as an artist gives me many fulfilling moments and remains my priority. Time is a rare resource, so for now, the printed version remains a dream – one that continues to inspire and accompany me.