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

4 comments:

  1. Does your choice of blogspot as opposed to Gcom's own blog section mean the blog section of Gcom will be dropped?

    Gcom used to be a point of reference for guitar on the web and I know that if anyone can restore it as such, it is you. Thank you for paying personal attention to the development and I'm looking forward to a bright future for this site.

    -a loyal site member.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As a former moderator of the "classic" guitar.com site and a HUGE fan of D'Addario products (EXL140 strings rule), I must say that I am looking forward to this redevelopement. In my opinion, when this site was originally transformed to it's current form from it's classic form, it really went down hill fast. Are their any plans to modify the forums and user profiles? Perhaps making is seem a little less.... ummm... sparse?

    -Rob

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rob:

    Thanks. you are right. . the people we hired to relaunch this several years ago, destroyed a good thing. We have studied this in depth at this point and we are in alignment with your feelings. The forums and user profiles will be modified for sure. It takes a long time for us to do this stuff, but we will get it done.

    I am building an internal team to do this to help speed the process. We did not take this approach before. Also, I will be personally staying involved until we have a great site.

    Please be patient and keep the comments coming. They are very helpful to us when making decisions.

    JD

    ReplyDelete
  4. Are you going to re-post the Reverend Horton Heat videos (9-part)? They are up on Youtube but the quality isn't great.
    Too many sites have nothing but Ywngvie, Steve Vai and P Gilbert. Playing Guitar doesn't have to be about who can play Scales the fastest.

    ReplyDelete