Thursday, September 23, 2010

Review Mirrors

So, I'm living out my teenage dreams...sitting in a room full of guitars and pedals and lesson books and instructional videos and amplifiers and software and...

Lots of cool gear reviews coming soon on Guitar.com!!

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

October 2009

Okay Guitar.com users, get ready. We’re about to launch our latest version. Much will change with this updated version. Our goal here was to bring back a great deal of the content that was removed back in 2007 and at the same time, introduce some new content for G.com users to check out.

We’ve brought on a few new “partners” that will be providing us with new lessons, educational tips and other instructional “how-to’s” to help you become a better guitar player. The newest feature will be a section called “New to Guitar.” This section will be for beginning guitar players looking to get an introduction into the world of guitar. This section will have everything from a glossary on the many terms related to guitars as well as a few beginner guitar lessons. We’ll also be adding more content for intermediate guitarists and then we’ll follow up with some more advanced content in the not-too-distant future.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be adding more features and additional benefits to the site. However, we want to alert you to the simple fact that there is going to be a great deal of change coming. The “Web Cred” feature that is built into the discussion forums will most likely be going away. We can’t find a reason to continue this element. The Musician’s Friend cooperative program that was started largely in concert with the Web Cred feature has long since lapsed. We will also be putting a post up on the discussion forums that will ask for a few users to help with the beta-testing process. You can email us with your thoughts and comments as well. As we’ve been part of numerous updates and changes to Guitar.com since 2002, we look forward to hearing your comments and insights. Thanks for visiting with us here at Guitar.com – Jim D’Addario

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Guitar.com Summer Update 2009

August 2009 – Much has changed since our last blog post and then again, much has stayed the same. Our goal is to have a revitalized Guitar.com, up and running this September. New features, new articles, videos, guitar lessons, contests, promotions, much more than I care to mention in a single blog post. Please know that we’re diligently working through the details and will be asking those of you that contribute to our discussion forums to become part of a beta-testing team. We’ll put up a post in the forums some time before the August finishes up looking for testers so stay tuned.

We still have a great deal to do, as we’re partnering with numerous companies in an effort to bring as much value to the New Guitar.com platform, as we possibly can. Remember, that this updated release, is only a snapshot of what’s to come. We have plans for a much larger release in 2010. We want to thank those of you who have taken the time to send us emails with their thoughts, comments and concerns (and curse those spam bots that won’t leave us alone). We’ll do our very best to stay on track from a timeline standpoint. We look forward to launching the NEW Guitar.com and hope to hear from you in the not-too-distant future!

Friday, May 22, 2009

Guitar.com Spring 2009 Update

It’s been 8 weeks since my last blog post but it hasn’t been because I didn’t want to keep Guitar.com visitors up-to-date. Things have been moving at a breakneck pace and we’ve held meetings with a wide variety of potential partners and contributors for the site. In the last 4 weeks alone, we’ve met with additional developers, programmers, and publishers, all in an effort to begin the grand undertaking that will become the new Guitar.com. Many of these meetings opened new doors for new ideas and potential partnerships which both excite and complicate the process.

Our first benchmark date has been set for mid-July. This date will coincide with the 2009 Summer NAMM to be show held in Nashville, TN. It will be our intent to have all the old Guitar.com content (interviews, videos, lessons, etc) up and searchable, and we will be introducing new content from numerous sources. New elements such as Contests, Tools, Educational Resources, a “Getting Started” section for beginners along with a host of other new features will slowly be integrated into the site, as we progress to the official re-launch of Guitar.com.

We can’t thank the users of Guitar.com enough, as your thoughts, concepts, critique (both good and bad) have been most valuable. We’d like to ask you to keep them coming. This push/pull process has helped guide us towards a better vision of what Guitar.com should become.

If you aren’t already aware of our new Planet Waves Chordmaster App for iPhone, please be sure to visit the Apple App Store to check it out. Because of the excellent content, penned by my personal guitar teacher Steve Salerno, it has received exceptional reviews from dozens and dozens of users. We just released the new Scale Wizard this past week and it’s also receiving strong reviews. These types of guitar-based tools will be an important part of what we want to provide Guitar.com users. We have much planned in this regard.

If you have some additional thoughts, please send them along to us at admin@guitar.com. We’ll be sure to respond promptly or add your comments to our growing list of “Ideas and Concepts”. Thanks for taking the time to check out guitar.com. Do us a favor and tell a friend or two about Guitar.com and the new features that we’ll be introducing in the near future.

Jim D'Addario

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Jim D’s Blog – 3-31-09

Dear Guitar.com Users:

Over the last three months, we have been feverishly working on plans for the development of the Guitar.com site. I want to thank the Guitar.com members who have offered suggestions. They are all being considered.

We recently hired Gjergji Theka as our full-time developer and Don Dawson has returned as site manager. Gjergji, a guitar player/teacher, recent Berklee graduate and web developer, is working directly with me and my team on the Guitar.com redevelopment. We are very excited to have him on board. From time to time, you will see blogs, emails and forum posts answered by Gjergji.

Along with this blog, you may have noticed a link on the home page to the Beta version of Chordmaster and Scalemaster for Internet Explorer and Safari. This is the first of many tools we will be developing for Guitar.com and the iPhone, and we hope you find it useful. The Chordmaster application is now available for the iPhone and Scalemaster will follow shortly. We welcome your feedback.

This on-line application is based on our Planet Waves Chordmaster library penned by Stephen Salerno and a complete guitar scale library authored by Marc Schonbrun into an on-line application for use on Guitar.com. Both Marc and Steve are D’Addario Musician’s Advisory Board artists and well respected players and educators. In fact, I have taken lessons with both of them.

Recently, we have fixed some bugs in the video sections of our site and loaded nearly one thousand videos from our library. All of our videos are hosted on YouTube and are accessible through Guitar.com.

We are now retrieving all of the video content from the original Guitar.com site as there were many classic interviews, lessons and human interest pieces of value in that library. We hope to have them all restored in the very near future.

We have spent the last two months banging out the vision, mission and strategies for Guitar.com with our staff, college interns, end users and consultants. We have all agreed and are committed to the following vision and mission for our site:

Vision – To be a valuable, interactive musician’s community with a wealth of quality content, educational resources and tools.

Mission – To educate, inform and entertain with valuable content and selected partners, creating more music makers, while developing a self-sustaining business model.

Please be patient with us as we begin to roll out new and exciting features for Guitar.com. Part of this process is building a team at D’Addario for the Guitar.com project and also finding and negotiating valuable partnerships for content on the site. All of these things take time and resources. As always, we welcome your suggestions.

We appreciate your interest and support, and we look forward to your feedback.

Sincerely,

Jim D’Addario

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Anecdotes from Jim D'Addario #1

Jim D’Addario Anecdotes
My second father Mario Maccaferri

They say timing is everything in life and surely for me I have been blessed with being in the right place at the right time on more than one occasion. As a child I loved to tinker. I had a work bench in our basement with my own tools where I tinkered with building amplifiers, speaker cabinets, amateur radios and countless other do-it-yourself projects.

Attracted to music more and more, first the piano and then later the guitar in the early 60’s, I got more and more interested my family’s string business. My grandfather and Dad worked out of a tiny shop in the basement of my grand parents’ home in Jackson Heights, NY. I loved to go there in the evenings or on Saturdays with my Dad. There was always an extra machine or tools to tinker with. I recall dreaming of building automatic machinery so that my Dad wouldn’t have to work so hard hand winding strings.

Many times on a Saturday I would tag along when Dad made deliveries to his customers. My favorite place to go to with him was Mastro Industries, Inc. in the Bronx. Mastro seem like a gigantic enterprise to me and in actuality it was; a full city block in size it was the brain child of luthier, guitarist and engineer Mario Maccaferri, famous to guitarists for his Selmer Django Reinhardt guitars.

Most of the trips I tagged along on to Mastro were to deliver ukulele strings for his plastic TV Pal ukuleles. Ukulele strings are monofilament nylon with a knot on one end. With the help of TV celebrity Arthur Godfrey’s endorsement Mario made and shipped nearly seven million TV Pal ukuleles from 1949 (the year I was born) into the 1960’s. At four strings a uke, that is 28 million strings, if anyone is counting.

Our entire family knotted ukulele strings while watching TV or in between homework and chores. You really weren’t allowed to just ‘sit’ around. On those delivery trips, Mario used to stop whatever he was doing to sit down for a cup of coffee with my Dad. On most visits he would take out a classical guitar and play something he was transcribing or practicing.

Early in his career Mario was one of the most successful touring classical guitarists in Europe. He had a sweetness of tone, a romantic flare for phrasing and musicality that was truly unique. I was always mesmerized when he played for us. But even more exciting to me was walking around his monstrous factory; seeing the huge molding and packaging machines, an office full of engineers and draftsmen designing products and molds, and hundreds of workers in constant motion.

If you are interested in learning more about Mario read some of the articles on the web like these:
http://www.lutherie.net/mario_en.html
http://www.harpguitars.net/history/maccaferri/month-player,macc.htm

From those early visits a bond was formed between Mario and me that would grow and grow as each year passed. As his business career ebbed and mine started to get traction he took a personal interest in what we were doing at D’Addario. He would take trips to visit to see what new machines or products I was working on and he would offer some of his expert advice.

He was an old school guy and did not get along with his son Marco in business. He was not an easy person to contradict, but for some reason I was able to get away with more than he accepted from his son. After his visits I could expect daily phone calls with new ideas about everything I showed him upon his previous visit. His mind was amazing. It was my first experience getting to know a true genius. Sometimes I didn’t take his advice and pushed back. He would continue to come back at me each day until I either tried what he suggested or convinced him that his approach was not feasible. I loved the dialog even though the two Italians disagreeing can be a little volatile at times.

Many times my wife Janet and I would take our three children to his home in Rye Beach for Maria’s homemade lasagna. Both Mario and Maria were originally from Bologna; I don’t have to tell you how delicious those dinners were. Our children still talk about them today.

On one occasion we were sitting around his dinner table and of course after dinner, out comes the guitar. Mario serenaded us with some beautiful classical pieces and then thrust the guitar into my hands insisting that I play something. A folk-pop-guitarist, with no classical technique whatsoever Janet and performed a folk song of the period finger picking like Bob Dylan or Peter Yarrow. I thought it sounded pretty good. When we finished, there was silence. He looked at me and said, “You should be shot.”

This was Mario’s way of saying, ‘how could you waste your talent and not learn how to play properly. It was a classic Mario moment. We all laughed.’

In 1980 Janet and I started running a concert series at NYC Merkin Concert Hall called Debuts and Premieres. The premise of the series, sponsored by our newly formed foundation, was to debut upcoming classical guitarists and to premiere new works for the classical guitar. Mario loved to come to these concerts and because we didn’t want him driving at night, we used to pick him and Maria up at their home. We met some of the greatest guitarists and composers during this period.

One particular concert, he got the date wrong and thought it was a week earlier than it really was. Dressed in his suit and tie pacing back and forth for an hour, we never showed up. He was depressed for a week, but his Italian pride wouldn’t allow him to call me to ask what happened. On Friday the following week I called him to confirm that I would pick him up Saturday at 6 PM for dinner and the concert. Maria later told me about his sulking for a week and how his face lit up when he realized we hadn’t stood him up the week before. Of course he couldn’t confess that HE got the date wrong – again classic Mario.

On another occasion we were having a dinner party at our home with a handful of the great guitarists that either played or were going to play on our concert series. Ben Verdery was there, as was Elliot Fisk, Alice Artzt, Jorge Morel and of course I invited Mario. After dinner the guitars came out and we were treated to some great performances. Elliot, Jorge and Alice played first, and then the guitar was passed to Mario. At age 83 he just finished transcribing the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique for classical guitar. Written in Ab he transposed it up a half step to A for this transcription. Needless to say, there were a few clinkers in there but his tone was incomparable. Our mouths dropped. Out of respect, Ben refused to play after the master finished.

There is a wealth of information on Mario Maccaferri out there. I could write pages and pages of anecdotes and stories about him and our relationship. He was truly a master musician, a brilliant inventor, a talented luthier, a reed maker and plastic industry pioneer. To me he was a second father.

Jim D’Addario



http://www.daddario.com/
http://www.planetwaves.com/
http://www.evansdrumheads.com/

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Jim D's Blog

Dear Guitar.com Users:

Over the last three months, we have been feverishly working on plans for the development of the Guitar.com site. I want to thank the Guitar.com members who have offered suggestions. They are all being considered.

We recently hired Gjergji Theka as our full-time developer and project coordinator for the site. . Gjergji, a guitar player/teacher, recent Berklee graduate and web developer, is working directly with me and my team on the Guitar.com redevelopment. We are very excited to have him on board. From time to time, you will see blogs, emails and forum posts answered by Gjergji.

Along with this blog, you may have noticed a link on the home page to the Beta version of Chordmaster and Scalemaster for Internet Explorer and Safari. This is the first of many tools we will be developing for Guitar.com and the iPhone, and we hope you find it useful. We welcome your feedback. http://www.guitar.com/chord-scale-master/

This application is based on our Planet Waves Chordmaster library penned by Stephen Salerno and a complete guitar scale library authored by Marc Schonbrun into an on-line application for use on Guitar.com. Both Marc and Steve are D’Addario Musician’s Advisory Board artists and well respected players and educators. In fact, I have taken lessons with both of them.


Recently, we have fixed some bugs in the video sections of our site and loaded nearly one thousand videos from our library. All of our videos are hosted on YouTube and are accessible through Guitar.com.

We are now retrieving all of the video content from the original Guitar.com site as there were many classic interviews, lessons and human interest pieces of value in that library. We hope to have them all restored in the very near future.

We have spent the last two months banging out the vision, mission and strategies for Guitar.com with our staff, college interns, end users and consultants. We have all agreed and are committed to the following vision and mission for our site:

Vision – To be a valuable, interactive musician’s community with a wealth of quality content, educational resources and tools.

Mission – To educate, inform and entertain with valuable content and selected partners, creating more music makers, while developing a self-sustaining business model.

Please be patient with us as we begin to roll out new and exciting features for Guitar.com. Part of this process is building a team at D’Addario for the Guitar.com project and also finding and negotiating valuable partnerships for content on the site. All of these things take time and resources. As always, we welcome your suggestions.

We appreciate your interest and support, and we look forward to your feedback.

Sincerely,

Jim D’Addario