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