Three great online communities for musicians

Online communities are one of the greatest things about using the net, and as a musician I’ve heavily used a bunch over the past decade. I thought it might be useful to point you in the direction of some forums that you may not have come across before. They all have long-standing populations of musicians that are usually very welcoming of newcomers. I’ve found that forums like these can solve a lot of problems as well as being a great source of advice for those looking to buy new or used musical instruments. I also learnt on one of these forums that one can suffer from GAS – Gear Addiction Syndrome.

In no particular order:

1. Musicplayer Forums

Run by the US company that publishes EQ, Bass Player, Guitar Player and Keyboard magazine, these forums cover all the bases. If your forum post makes a particularly original or interesting point, it also can end up in the magazines. Disclosure: I do moderate one of the smaller forums (for free) and have been a contributor on the forums for nearly ten years.

2. Gearslutz

This community is focused on the recording musician, and it shows in the number and breadth of topics covered. Plenty of options for the newcomer to computer-based recording.

3. Harmony Central

Arguably one of the bigger communities online, there’s an enormous range of sub-forums including some high traffic off-topic forums. I find the signal to noise ratio can be high but the size of the community means there’s no shortage of interesting discussions going on.

So jump in. Forums sometimes get overlooked in favour of social media, but all three examples given show there are huge communities doing the do with not a Like button in sight.

Reminder: $5000L on offer for forum sign-up competition

A couple of weeks back we relaunched our forums and there’s been a number of people sign up and start contributing. For any forum’s success there needs to be a critical mass of participants and there’s certainly not that yet.

To help get things kick-started we have a competition running. Any person who signs up on the forums between now and the end of August goes into the draw to win 5000 Linden Dollars. It’s not a huge prize but if you’re looking for a virtual worlds community to be part of anyway, it’s certainly a nice little incentive. If you’re not a Second Life user you can easily cash the Linden Dollars out for US dollars (we’ll explain how).

So jump in and register and join the community.

Relaunching our forums (and a competition)

When we first launched in late 2006 we also had forums, which were moderately utilised on those first months, particularly by the ABC prior to the launch of ABC Island. We closed the forums down mid-2007 due to lack of activity and some technical problems with the platform we were using.

I’m really pleased to re-launch the forums which can be found here or via the ‘Forum’ link at the top of this site. The focus is widened and the actual design fits better with the overall site.

On the downside, due to a database corruption I wasn’t able to import all the previous posts into the new forum – it’s literally a blank slate so if you’d previously registered, you’ll need to do so again. Sorry!

If you’ve got a point to make, an event to promote or just want to mix with other virtual world residents, please use the forums – that’s what they’re there for.

To celebrate the relaunch, we’re offering 5000 Linden Dollars to a lucky someone who posts on the forums by the end of August 2008. We’ll get a random number generator to give us a number – the person who posted that number post will be the winner. Example: if the random number was 77 – the person who posted the 77th post wins the prize.

So jump in, start a discussion and maybe you’ll be rewarded for your efforts beyond the rewards of forum interaction 😉

Is it a long-term slide?

I’ve had some interesting comments privately from people about the significant decline on active Australian Second Life users over the past two months.

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So, I’ve created a topic on the SLOz forums to delve a bit deeper – why the slump? Wold love to hear your thoughts.

The SL voice experience so far

On the SLOz forums, Juko Tempel has invited comments on residents’ experiences with voice in SL to date.

How have you found it? How often do you use voice versus text?

To voice or not to voice? There really is a question

Unless you haven’t logged into SL in the past few days, you’ll be aware that voice is now part of the main grid browser. It remains an optional download at present but it’s certainly ramping up. New World Notes are running a reader poll on voice take-up and its early results are interesting:

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It’s no great surprise that there’s initial resistance to voice from well-established SL users and there’ll no doubt be some technical and etiquette issues over coming weeks with the wider use of voice. New SL users will probably take to voice more quickly. I don’t think anyone’s making claims of text-based communication dying out though. There are som many areas where being able to type your thoughts is the superior option. Eventually the two will probably co-exist fairly amicably but in the short term I think lots of land parcels will have voice switched off.

What do you think? Don’t forget the Voice forum on our discussion forums, moderated by Juko Tempel.

Joys and Sorrows of Voice in Second Life

On the SLOz forums, Aussie SL’er Juko Tempel asked for a discussion on voice in SL. So we’ve made her moderator of the Voice in SL forum.

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Drop in and join the debate on voice-enabled SL and its joys and sorrows for you.

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