Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 24, 2016

In my early days as an itinerant musician playing my first club gigs at the tender age of 16 or 17 or so, one of the first things I noticed is how oddly obsessive a lot of guitar players are about their axes. As a keyboard player myself, I was frequently at the mercy of club owners and whatever piano and/or keyboard they had deigned to make available, but even the keyboards I actually owned frankly never meant as much to me as the guitars seemed to mean to my guitar playing buddies. That love affair between player and instrument might be more understandable to “outsiders” (i.e., non guitar players) after watching the often ebullient Turn It Up!, a loving overview not just of the history of the electric guitar but of many of its most iconic proponents.

Kevin Bacon is on hand as host and “segue manager”, offering fewer than six degrees of separation between a vast array of guitar superstars, going back to the days of Les Paul and the Fender operation and then continuing on through a Who’s Who of standouts (B.B. King, Robby Krieger, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Slash, and Dave Mason among many others). The documentary offers a glut of interviews, some of them oddly moving (these guys love their guitars, I’m telling you). There’s also a lot of great archival footage here sure to delight both musicians (pro or otherwise) or air guitarists of all ages.

Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 71st Street Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (largely) in 1.78:1 (archival footage is in variant aspect ratios, often at or around 1.33:1). This is another documentary which has been cobbled together from different sources and so has an understandably heterogeneous appearance. As should be expected, contemporary interview segments look the best, with appealing detail and sharpness levels. Archival footage is widely variant in quality, especially some which looks to have been sourced from older broadcast elements, which bring along a number of anomalies like ghosting.

Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar features DTS-HD Master Audio tracks in both 5.1 and 2.0 formulations, but the surround track really only provides extra spaciousness and low end emphasis when the snippets of musical performances take place. Otherwise, this is by and large a talking heads outing (albeit with perhaps more than usual amounts of interstitial music) where there's relatively little differentiation between the surround and stereo versions. That said, fidelity is excellent across the board, offering excellent reproductions of sometimes slightly spotty sounding archival audio.

Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:38)

A Bonus DVD included in the package offers extended interviews with several of the documentary's participants.

Turn It Up! A Celebration of the Electric Guitar Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Musicians in general and guitarists in particular will find a lot to love in Turn It Up!, albeit maybe not quite as much as some guitarists find to love about their own guitars. There's some great historical information (and archival video) here, along with some equally interesting interviews. Recommended.