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Why Harmony Central?


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This is the place on the Internet if you want to be met with respect, no matter what your level of expertise is. At HC everyone seem to realize that you can take yet another step and you never know where that is taking you or what you need to get there. So in the spirit of "what goes around, comes around", everyone is sharing their knowledge when I ask something.

 

Thanks to all!

 

Cheers,

 

Mats N

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I haven't been here all that long. A little over three years. I no longer remember how I discovered this place but I do remember seeing that Craig Anderton was a part of it, and that alone was enough to get me interested. Since then, it's become a daily place to go for me. I've made some real friends here, and it's spilled over to another forum, to collaborations, to gear purchases based on reviews here. It's become a part of my life, I log in virtually everyday. There are days when I don't view my emails but I come here.

 

I Love this place!

 

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I joined SSS over at Music Player back in the day and have gotten to know several people here and we are friends on FB. Honestly, I question the need for a forum anymore. Granted, I still belong to a few but I visit less and less. It seems that FB is where everything is and its so easy to upload and share videos.

 

I really feel HC could take it to the next level with short 5 minute videos that give playing on your basic instruments and mixing tips. Short 5 minute lessons on EQ, compression would also be very helpful to the newbies. Hard to imagine why a site like this cannot do something and sort of become the online hub for musicians.

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My avatar says I joined in July 2005 - altho' I think that might have just been an HC reboot point and I was here some time, maybe years, before that. Anyway I've been here a while. I doubt my reasons for hanging around are unique - I was looking for technical information and discussions, reviews, and a point of contact with other musicians. There have been high points and low points, no question.

 

Craig's presence has been something of a pole star, orienting the topics and discussions around an expectation of intelligent content, bona fide expertise, and a civilized (but not too civilized) atmosphere. Contrast this place to Gearslutz where I'm in and out all the time, just scoping specific threads on technical and gear topics, and where I don't feel like I know a soul there, really.

 

The social and community aspect of HC ebbs and flows....I like to think I've made friends here, to the extent authentic friendship can be achieved in such an ephemeral and one-step-removed environment. I certainly know the cast of mind of a good number of participants, similar to the way you come to know longstanding fellow employees or classmates, etc. I'm enough of a soft-hearted fool that my feelings can be hurt or edified via online interaction - maybe one of those "there are two kinds of people" distinctions between those who let online interaction be real to some extent, and those who simply see it as a game.

 

I don't see how Facebook can do this sort of thing - it's a huge jumbled mess to me - no community at all. Cat videos and baby pictures and political rants and 3rd party ads and inane posts clutter it all up to the extent that I look at it maybe once or twice a week until I'm bored - which doesn't take long. Maybe I haven't customized my Facebook world to make it a source of value to me....who has time? quoth the Merovingian.

 

I'd miss HC if it folded up. I already miss the good ol' days when activity was high and it seemed like a hangout rather than a place to check up on from time to time. The wheel will turn.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

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I was here checking reviews trying to figure out the internet and what to buy. One day the Mackie site went down and I signed up here just so I could ask somebody. I believe it was Mike Rivers that answered. At least that's my recollection. I never bothered introducing myself and nobody asked. Just liked throwing pennies into the fountain I guess.

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I used to visit here when this and porn sites were all there were on the internet. Well okay, and geocities and aol were around. What was that, 1995? In fact Jules and all those guys didn't have their own sites either. They all came here..... or wherever Craig was then.

 

I come here now because they give away a new Gibson guitar every week, a new car every month, and I haven't yet noticed Craig blow his stack over anything. Which I'm eagerly waiting for. I'm also more popular with girls after visiting HC and my teeth are whiter.

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Ive been a member since the prior host before HC. I like that the signal-to-noise ratio is really great. Most other forums I've seen have 'regulars' who clutter up EVERY thread with snarky remarks, but rarely actually say anything. I like that people here have more respect and consideration. A great test when checking out a forum is to see the responses to a dumb question from a newbie. If they are mean, I move on. That never seems to happen here.

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Yeah me too... got here because of Anderton and started with the old Music Player SSS forums. I found those forms by searching for a Part II of an article I had in an old issue of Electronic Musician magazine. I couldn't find the next issue with the Part II, even though I'm sure I still have it somewhere. So I got on the web and searched for Craig Anderton and the title of the article. I never did find a cyber copy of the article and don't even remember what it was now, but I found SSS... and the rest my friends is Internet music history, myth and legend. :cool:

 

By the way, good piece in the link about HC, Dendy. :thu:

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Well, I wanted to learn about songwriting and was on other sites doing that. Joined here to get different views and feedback...I am not really a musician( I mean I play a guitar but I am not a guitar player). Been teaching myself to play for the last 7-8 years or so and for the most part its just a hobby. I do like music though and heck why not hang out with people that do things I like...I have several songs that I need to record and someday will get motivated to do that...Lo-Fi in comparison to many of you with real musical experience but it is what it is...

 

I also came to learn a bit about acoustic guitars and had questions answered in the acoustic section...Stack of Bones had a monthly Virtual Music 1 Take recording get together and I really enjoyed that.

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one of the most stupid articles ever to appear on HC imo

 

but first off, I'll also explain how I got here in the first place.

The year was 1995. I stumbled upon OLGA and thought I struck gold. Thousands and thousands of guitar tabs submitted by anonymous users, I printed boxes full of these OLGA guitar tabs, all wrong …

Harmony Central got my attention in 1998 or so, while researching gear.

I discovered the user reviews.

I started lurking at the forums around 1999, and finally joined in 2002. My first thread was a question about a pedal purchase I was about to make, wantinge some feedback. I got instant replies.

There was no moderation and the community was great , it was the great era of the HC forums.

 

Harmony Central was all about user content, provided by the community

But it changed with the change of ownership in 2005, that is the turning point. In 2008, the site went kaputt and the community started to diminish. But there was still a lot of activity. Indeed the Jive and Lithium platforms really did a lot of harm to the community. And the return to vbulletin is also a big failure imo. Now 2 years later, it is still not working right, it is slow, it lets spam through, it has no proper search, there are bugs from day 1 that are still not fixed today.

 

And most importantly, it did not bring back the community.Yadda, yadda, community.

 

"what the community likes about Harmony Central is, not surprisingly, the community ... "

truth is this community (more than 750.000 members) is non existent, there are about 100 regulars and that's it

that's not much of a community

fail

 

"The other big attraction is that Harmony Central has become a repository for music information—a veritable university of knowledge"

yup, but when you don't have an advanced search, you cannot retrieve that information

fail

 

"So, why don’t we remove some of the data? There is simply too much good information mixed with all the other information, and unfortunately, if you remove information, it produces broken search returns and in turn punishes HC with folks like Google."

if you search on Google, Harmony Central is not really showing up in the search results, this used to be different, if you googled Tube Screamer back in the day, you would get a HC User Review in the top 10 results. No longer so.

fail

 

"There is no software platform available today that can handle the amount of traffic HC gets in a day".

HC does not get a lot of traffic. Last time I checked number of unique visotrs is still falling. Now I remember seeing "Fuzz, the sound that revolutionized the world" documentary from 2007, in which a HC spokesperson said that HC was the leading on-line platform for musicians and that it had over 2 million unique visitors a month. Nowadays it's not a lot.

 

HC_visits_zpsah6egptr.jpg

fail

 

Now I made the comparison before, Macrumors.com, they have 800.000 members, 20 million posts, a lot of forums, a lot of articles, a lot of news. They also were pushed to do a platform change. They asked their community first, implemented the suggestions and feedback from the community, tested things, took their time to prepare the move and when they flicked the switch, it was all good. They still have 5 million unique visitors each month. The community did have to adjust to the new software (they use Xenforo, and hey, they have no spam, they have advanced search, and a lot of cool features) HC went with vBulletin in April 2014, there was a lot of negativity about vB5, and yeah, now 2 years later with vB5.2.1 things might have improved a little, but you know better how much time, effort, resources and money it took to get it to work, and for me it still is by far the worst forum experience of all (I visit about 20 forums).

fail.

 

"But the major reason for why "Harmony Central?" is our core mission: To get more people involved in music, and inspire those who already are to make better music."

Sounds great. But in my 14 years at HC, not for a split second did I think I am making better music because of HC. I cannot think of any reason.

I fail

 

So overall, HC is not really living up to its mission statement.

“Educating, entertaining, and empowering the world’s largest online community of musicians.”

seems great on paper, but in reality, there is not much of a community left and it is not easy to win it back.

I'm not sure if it is even possible.

Other music forums have the community. User Reviews are nowadays more a YouTube thing

Articles and News are nice to have, but you cannot build a community on that

without the community, HC is becoming irrelevant.

 

HC_trend2_zpsxvievntm.jpg

 

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without the community, HC is becoming irrelevant.

 

 

 

Like, for instance, you epic threads! The highlight of my work day in the mid-00's was the seemingly random Bieke photo threads that grew faster than I could hit refresh! Certainly, should we ever cross paths, I owe you as many beverages as the barkeep will allow before cutting us off!

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Harmony Central was all about user content, provided by the community

 

But it changed with the change of ownership in 2005, that is the turning point. In 2008, the site went kaputt and the community started to diminish. But there was still a lot of activity. Indeed the Jive and Lithium platforms really did a lot of harm to the community. And the return to vbulletin is also a big failure imo. Now 2 years later, it is still not working right, it is slow, it lets spam through, it has no proper search, there are bugs from day 1 that are still not fixed today.

 

And most importantly, it did not bring back the community.Yadda, yadda, community.

 

To use your terminology Bieke (good observations btw), I believe the community still exists but we are no longer centered around our desktops. Everything today is mobile and app based. I think HC would be wise to create an app where this site could be accessed on the cells! I also think there is less interested in forums for most users. The forum is already "old". Today everything is on the phone and the info has to be easily accessible. You mentioned how in 2008 the site went "kaputt". That was also a big year for Facebook.

 

The rise of Facebook and Twitter tells me that people still want to communicate but the venue in which they do so is again, mobile and app based. HC should consider an app where threads act more like Facebook. You can easily add comments, like posts, and (this is key) easily upload photos, links, and music all on your iPhone. HC needs to meet the community where its at and that is social media. HC needs to become a social media app where quick videos can be accessed for anyone interested in learning about recording, playing instruments, etc... and reviews. Reviews need to be in video format now and audio needs to accompany these videos because nothing tells you more about an instrument or piece of gear that sound.

 

I don`t need charts or an outside consulting firm to tell me where the community is. Yes, everyone is online but they want to experience HC in a convenient place... their cell phone.

 

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The last graph doesn't have a Y-axis calibration...

 

No one said re-building back the site would be easy or fast, quite the opposite. But there is no question that people make better music because of Harmony Central, or the content wouldn't be referenced elsewhere. There have been plenty of forum threads where people have gained knowledge about making or recording music. If you haven't participated in them, that's a choice and that's okay.

 

As to the decline of forums, I'm not going to mention other sites but I searched the main music sites I can think of on Alexa.com, and every single one had gone down considerably in ranking over the past year. The only site I found that did not have a steady decline over the past year is the gear page; it had a modest recovery where since March, it flattened at where it was last July.

 

Of course, with more sites coming online every day, rankings of sites for "minorities" like musicians will rank lower than the entertainment/celebrity/boob sites. Most sites are getting a smaller piece of the pie because there are a whole lot more slices.

 

Furthermore, we have not really begun to market Harmony Central. This is on purpose. We will not market the site and try to either re-build an old community or build a new one until it is functioning properly. The site was in terrible shape when it was acquired, and fixing it has been time-consuming. We moved to new servers only last month, and updated vBulletin only about 3 months ago. Results will not be instant.

 

The world is always changing. Forums are being replaced by Facebook. MySpace was the darling of cyberspace, now it's gone. Ditto CompuServe. Rocket Network, DigitalMusician.net, etc. etc, - all dead.

 

We can sit here, wring our hands, talk about the good old days, and bemoan the mismanagement that made me quit in disgust and a year later, fire all the editors and freeze the home page with geriatric mockeries of rockers..

 

What would that accomplish? Nothing.

 

Instead, we are working to anticipate the future, and what people will need in 2020. Some of our plans are ambitious and will likely be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. Others are doable. Some require different technologies.

 

We are in this for the long haul and have outlasted a lot of other sites. Evolution is about adapting to change, mutating, and growing. We are in the process of figuring out what that will look like. This site is not just forums. It's the content, our YouTube channel, the newsletter, and with more elements to come.

 

To act like the fate of Harmony Central is some isolated incident is naive and wrong. Software and interfaces are down 20% over the past 5 years. Pro Tools continues to decline. DJ gear flattened out a long time ago and is in decline. You can have a #1 album by selling 17,000 physical copies. The entire music business is in the dumps. All the sites I referenced as declining are simply reflecting the reality of the current musical environment.

 

Sure, we could say we're all doomed and throw in the towel. Or we can realize that everything goes in cycles, and try to prepare to be the site that figures out a way to re-invent the medium in a few years. Will we succeed? Who knows. But we don't sit around and complain about it, we'll do what we can to move forward.

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HC needs to become a social media app where quick videos can be accessed for anyone interested in learning about recording, playing instruments, etc... and reviews. Reviews need to be in video format now and audio needs to accompany these videos because nothing tells you more about an instrument or piece of gear that sound.

 

I don`t need charts or an outside consulting firm to tell me where the community is. Yes, everyone is online but they want to experience HC in a convenient place... their cell phone.

 

Our YouTube channel is mobile-accessible. It has 14,000,000+ views. In the last 28 days, it had 68,000+ views, 163,000 minutes of watch time, and enough new subscribers to hit over 10,000 subscribers. And it keeps growing.

 

If you looked at the pro reviews you would see they are loaded with audio/video examples. The Anthology X thread has 15 audio/video demos and tons of screen shots, including some that show patches you can create. The Line 6 Helix review has audio examples of all the 40+ amps and of virtually all the effects. It has over 16,000 views, so I guess Bieke's community of 100 people like looking at the same thread over and over and over and over and over and over again. The UJAM Pro Review Xpress included free loops people could download as well as audio/video examples, and the Reach review has audio/video examples as well.

 

And yes, you can see/hear all of them on your iPhone just fine (turn it sideways when the videos appear). The people who are new to Harmony Central know this, that's where those 16,000 views came from. The old-timers...maybe not so much :)

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Oh. and the newsletter is another HC component. The only explanation for its circulation is if Bieke's community of 100 people have registered hundreds of times under different names. Yeah, that would explain it. And I guess they forget which name they open it under, so they keep re-opening it by mistake...that would account for the high open rate.

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