It's been nice to have a forum to stop in at daily and shoot the breeze. I got my start on the internet on forums...they were the original social media. But forums come and go and I'd been without a good place to hang for a while, so it's been real cool jumping in the forum here.
My first regular forum was Metal Manics. This was a magazine that catered to the more extreme genres that the rest of the mainstream mags ignored. Well, back in the late 90's when I got online, I managed to follow my interests at the time and ended up at their forum. Met a lot of cool people on there and I'm even still connected with several of them to this day. As things go, the magazine eventually went belly up and the forum went with it. It came back in other incarnations, but was never the same as the original family there.
After that, I ended up on the Musicplayer Forums, which was the forums for EQ Magazine, Guitar Player, Bass Player, Keyboard, Electronic Musician, and all that family of magazines. I've always had project studios and been recording/doing audio stuff for well over the last twenty years, so it was a good place to hang because I was heavy into it at the time.
Now that was a great group of people. The main forum for general chat was Craig Anderton's forum, author of Electronic Projects for Musicians...a classic and a man with too many other titles/jobs to list, the guy is a legend. Anyway, his forum was where everybody just chilled and talked. It was the "Sound, Studio, & Stage", but he likened it to a party where everybody was all hanging out talking about all kinds of things and as long as nobody was hanging from the chandeliers and getting the cops called, it was all good.
Well, we had a good long run there, but eventually business intervened like it usually does and the whole shebang got moved over to Harmony Central. Musicplayer still stayed around, but most of the family went to HC with the move.
Well, HC forums were a major clusterfuck before we ever got there. Imagine an unruly group of YouTube comment trolls running a whole site with 40 something sub forums...yeah, so needless to say the transition was rough and the original vibe had been disrupted.
Anyway, at some point HC decided to change the forum software and they managed to screw up the whole place worse than anything Micro$oft could ever manage. Seriously. They decided (probably by some sales guy in a suit) that using this help desk type forum software would be better. Well, needless to say, it was not. They literally had links coming in from years of activity that if you did a Google search on something music instrument related, they would be the whole first few pages of results. They 404'd it all. No kidding. To this day you can still do a search and get a link on the first page of Google that will take you to HC, but it's a redirect. The original link and thread is long gone. That's just one example of the nightmare they unleashed on our community.
So this was just all too much and most of us lost interest. I'm sure some of the people are still there, but I just got connected with all my contacts from there on Facebook and such and cleared out.
I was getting heavy into blogging and web design and other stuff as well, so I just kinda drifted out of there. But the tagline at the Musicplayer forums was "Expert Forums" and no kidding, these were forums with actual experts for moderators and members alike.
Famous producers, engineers, artists, writers, and all kinds of sound people from all fields of the music business populated those forums. I learned a lot of stuff there. I had some of the best discussions I've had online to this day there. If you had a question about anything, you'd get a range of helpful answers in record time. It was a great place and one I remember fondly, as I'm sure you can tell.
The point of this convoluted walk down memory lane is to say that this forum has that same vibe. Excellent signal to noise ratio. No annoying feedback loops. Etc.
And I just wanted to thank Dave and everybody here for welcoming people into the forums here. It feels like the old "Expert Forums". Cheers!
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