Improving the magazines...

dampoldman

Question is; how the hell would we organise anything?! I've got ideas but what to do with them?

TTony

dampoldman said:

Question is; how the hell would we organise anything?! I've got ideas but what to do with them?

Share your ideas, either here or via PM, and let's see if there's value in them.

If there is, we can then think about the "how".

EdGrip

I'm with Mike - I can't imagine ever buying a guitar mag again. They belong to a time before the interwebz. If I were on that train with that dead phone, I'd probably buy a book or a Q mag or a Little White Lies or something science-y. 

Roland

dampoldman said:

Question is; how the hell would we organise anything?! I've got ideas but what to do with them?

The same way that we do now: Acoustiic, Electric, Amp, FX etc, with a Forum Index of interesting items. We decide what subjects to cover based on demand. Recently we've had topics like "What do you think of X" and "What's the best Y". The difference is that, at a suitable point, some budding journalist, or a self appointed expert in the field, summarises the discussion, and that summary post is referenced in the index.

Manufacturer bias is controlled because there are plenty of us here who would cry foul, and because indexing is in the hands of a trusted group.

If this works well then we could move on, at a later date, and collate the summaries as a set of articles. The advantage of this approach is that it is organic, and doesn't need a lot of organising or management at the outset, but can grow into something more permanent. It's a bit like Wikipedia, but on a far smaller scale.

Alternatively we could all invade Wikipedia.

Stevepage

Guitarist - less focus on blues. Not everyone who reads it is a mid 50's guy with money to spare and only ever uses the pentatonic scale and only listens to Joe Bonamassa.

Guitar Techniques - less focus on blues and no more rehashed pentatonic scale lessons.

frictionfraction

No more bland, grey, reviews, best reviews in guitarist in my opinion are the tried and tested shorts.. And they can be formulaic. I want, Opinionated, humorous, rude and idiosyncratic reviews. I want reviews where the reviewer says in their opinion a is better than b.., tells you what the new guitar smells like, contemplates how cool it looks hung around their neck, tells you whether it is worth buying even if it means you can't afford to eat for the month or is it a only worth saving for out of the change you get from your Friday night post gig kebab. Rating systems are all rubbish and lead to homogeneity and conformity. Just keep it all the right side of defamation...

xSkarloey

Reviews of all kinds of gear would be welcome: new stuff, established things and discontinued items.

I like reviews that are based on genuine experience gained over time.

It's natural to want to read about the newsest gear, but at the same time there's always scope for people to write about gear in use over a longer period of time.

asimmd

Please remember not everyone likes the Overdriven/ Distorted sound that most players seem to favour. I think a lot of players forget there was a time when there was no Overdrive sound,and everything was clean.

Basher

RocknRollDave said:

For me, it comes down to one thing: More words.

Simple as that, they need to make the interviews more in-depth. I'll sit at my PC all day watching youtube videos of product demos, or checking out the spec of a new piece of kit, but I won't sit and read page after page of an article. With a magazine, i'll put it down halfway through a piece and come back to it later. Of course, I can do that with a web-based article too...point being that I won't with an online piece, even though I can. I'll just distracted by something else on the net and forget to come back to the article I started.

Agree 100%.

An example of a magazine that works well for me is Sound on Sound.

Maybe it's because in the Tech/Recording field there's a lot more to write about than yet more vintage Strat/LP reissues?

It's unashamedly "dense". There are very extensive product reviews but balanced by a much higher amount of "how to" articles and interviews from a broad range of industry insiders but they still feature reader's wives, sorry, studios.

They've also seem to have the whole print/web thing sorted. Most review and feature content is only available to subscribers for a 5 months after which it's unlocked for everyone. 

In Guitarist, the only innovation that has worked for me in recent years has been the long-term tests that I think are fantastic. I just wish the articles were longer and more detailed.

Other than that, the publication has been ossifying since the 90s. I bought it from the first issue and used to enjoy the homely style, encapsulated by Huw Lloyd Langton's "boil your strings up and knit your own fuzzbox" type articles. The years saw less and less of such idiosyncratic content and the current incarnation would appear to be nothing more that a monthly press release from Fengib Claptomassa plc.

dampoldman

I do see an opportunity to have some fun with it though, like a guitar version of the Framley Examiner. Fengib Claptomassa would obviously be a columnist Can't be too po-faced. 

DamianP

One of my personal hopes for this forum is that we can do more to raise the profile of our UK builders & businesses.

Perhaps ...

We get a few of our more esteemed members together in a room, with a review guitar from one of those business builders.  And an amp or two (probably brought by the members).  Perhaps the builder hosts the event, to save the risk of expensive guitars parcelfarcing their way around the country.  

Then video them playing and discussing the guitar for an hour or two, then edit that down to a more web-friendly 10-15 mins.  Through time, we could build up quite a range of these discussion-demo-reviews, done by "real" people.

Would that be a goer?

Here`s the deal,   Peer reviews.

Get the builders to bring their best work.   Choose various categories for evaluation,  Joinery, finish, fretwork etc.   The builders vote for the top 3 in each category. No votes for your own work.

I might trust a review like that.

Internet forum "experts" are a poor source of advice generally.  

 The best thing is always the thing they bought.   The thing they didn`t buy can`t possibly be as good.   Nobody wants to admit they chose anything but the best do they?  Even when they obviously didn`t.

Phil_aka_Pip

DamianP said:

One of my personal hopes for this forum is that we can do more to raise the profile of our UK builders & businesses.

Perhaps ...

We get a few of our more esteemed members together in a room, with a review guitar from one of those business builders.  And an amp or two (probably brought by the members).  Perhaps the builder hosts the event, to save the risk of expensive guitars parcelfarcing their way around the country.  

Then video them playing and discussing the guitar for an hour or two, then edit that down to a more web-friendly 10-15 mins.  Through time, we could build up quite a range of these discussion-demo-reviews, done by "real" people.

Would that be a goer?

Here`s the deal,   Peer reviews.

Get the builders to bring their best work.   Choose various categories for evaluation,  Joinery, finish, fretwork etc.   The builders vote for the top 3 in each category. No votes for your own work.

I might trust a review like that.

Internet forum "experts" are a poor source of advice generally.  

 The best thing is always the thing they bought.   The thing they didn`t buy can`t possibly be as good.   Nobody wants to admit they chose anything but the best do they?  Even when they obviously didn`t.

Or maybe they did choose the best within their own terms of reference, but not within someone else's.

EricTheWeary

We're trying to book a holiday to Spain in October ( given our usual level of prevarication it'll never happen...). So I'm looking at hotels on the travel websites and then looking at the hotels on TripAdvisor. I don't put any faith in any single review but I'll look for things that are of particular interest to me and gain a general impression of the place. I don't want to be swayed by the one person who got food poisoning  or the person who'd never been abroad before and found everything amazing. One person might complain its too near the airport, I might interpret that as short transfer from the airport. You get the picture.

So, the strength of internet sites is the herd review. If I ask 'has anyone tried a Zvex Box of Rock?' I'll get a dozen replies and someone will hate it and someone will love it and someone will suggest an alternative and I'll work out from that how it fits with what I want. If I have a specific issue then I can ask that. That's how this works.

A magazine review is not interactive in that way. If all it offers are the specs copied off the Zvex website and general impressions then what's the point? Shouldn't it be an expert review that offers an informed opinion digging into technical issues that we might not have thought of, testing it in a variety of scenarios,etc. 'With my strat into my Marshall combo it sounded great'  so what? Why would I pay money to read that when I can read similar stuff on here, TGP,Harmony Central, TDPRI,etc,etc?

Or, just face what I think we have concluded in the past - which is the magazines are for people who don't really use the internet much and/or buy out of habit and feel £6 per month is fine for looking at glossy pictures on the bog.

Elx

For a price of a pint down your local pub you get lessons and bedtime reading material for a week...I think that's a good deal, you guys are some difficult people

EricTheWeary

Elx said:

For a price of a pint down your local pub you get lessons and bedtime reading material for a week...I think that's a good deal, you guys are some difficult people

How much is a pint at your local then!?!

I usually buy a magazine each month so I'm not anti them but its usually Guitar Player now  - even though its expensive for what you get and a lot of it is filler it does feature interesting artists and the featured interview is usually of a higher standard than what you see in the UK mags.

Elx

I'm Dutch, Guitar Techniques is 14 EUR over here. I'm a subscriber though, so it's cheaper but for you guys it's 5 quid or something? A pint of Heineken is 5 EUR over here...

EricTheWeary

Elx said:

I'm Dutch, Guitar Techniques is 14 EUR over here. I'm a subscriber though, so it's cheaper but for you guys it's 5 quid or something? A pint of Heineken is 5 EUR over here...

TBH I can't remember the last time I bought a pint in a pub!

 Gosh, the magazines are expensive there.

:-O

Elx

EricTheWeary said:

Elx said:

I'm Dutch, Guitar Techniques is 14 EUR over here. I'm a subscriber though, so it's cheaper but for you guys it's 5 quid or something? A pint of Heineken is 5 EUR over here...

TBH I can't remember the last time I bought a pint in a pub!

 Gosh, the magazines are expensive there.

:-O

Yes, because we import them...I subscribe for 80 EUR year, and that's OK. That's a night out with my mates, two rounds of drinks...

dampoldman

@Elx

Hi mate - my missus is Dutch (Hup Holland...)

Quick question - what value do you think you get from a physical magazine that you don't get from the internet? 

Jetfire

I bought a load of guitar techniques magazines and leafed through them but I know I can just flick the guitar on and play without having to open the laptop, load youtube and hope it streams properly etc etc.