[Feature Request] Era / Year that Artist Had Gear

I love everything I'm reading here and can't wait to check it out later today. I appreciate that you pre-empted the follow-on requests I had locked and loaded for singles/EPs and landing pages for albums. :D

Thank you!

Update: workin' great so far

Interesting discussion going on in this Butch Vig <> Neve submission but I wanted to bring it back here. So to catch everyone up:

Our vision is this - the album Nevermind gets its own page soon --> "The Gear Used to Record Nirvana - Nevermind".

Aside from the artists in the band being listed on that page, I believe we'll need to be able to associate producers/engineers. So then, since the Nevermind <> Butch Vig association has been made, Nevermind will be able to be tagged on any gear added to Butch Vig.

Pk and spruce made some good points, about being able to tag people associated with the album in various roles. Session musicians was the example used. So my question to you all is this:

If Nevermind (or any album or single) had its own page, what are the types of associations that could be made (aside the artists involved officially in the band)? I'd rather start narrow and focused so let's not go too crazy granular. Can producer/engineer be combined into one? Session musician has been mentioned. What else is critical?

Mixing and mastering engineers would be essential. Maybe studio personnel is acceptable, cover artist would be cool but pushing it. I'd look as Discogs as the guide as it seems to be the most comprehensive place for album credits online.

I guess we did blow up that Butch Vig submission, maybe the longest submission thread that wasn't an argument.

I guess we did blow up that Butch Vig submission, maybe the longest submission thread that wasn't an argument.

Jim taught me to embrace the fine art of blowing up submission threads on EB... I no longer feel any shame. I don't think it harms the SEO or the viewer experience... besides, advertisers love "strong engagement signals" like that... we're so engaged! So much intent! Any ad you show us will go straight to the deepest darkest regions of our subconscious. It's money in the bank...

Oh totally, I feel like Jim really is the mentor to everyone on here, no idea what we'd do without him. What's a good email to reach you at Ken?

What's a good email to reach you at Ken?

If your email addresses associated w Equipboard are OK, I can connect you guys if you don't wanna share publicly, just lmk

That would be ideal actually

Thanks for askin' Giulio. re: producer/engineer: we currently have producer and Engineer as two separate roles when tagging artists, what's the advantage of combining the two roles in this context? Saving UI space?

(I think I'm gonna wake up to Jim's strong and hard-earned opinions on this particular question... I'll have some popcorn ready)

that'd be much appreciated re: email connection. thanks!

I toggled back to my Aphex Twin Syro gear list tab just now, to indulge in one of my favorite "warm up" (procrastination) chores: tagging every piece of gear in that list with the correct album on EB. Always good for a 10 minute reset; turn off brain and click, click, click...

...but it seems @gchiaren has found a way to tag 'em all up behind the scenes? Everything on the list is now tagged, but the 200 or so items I hadn't gotten to yet don't have any recent updates in their edit history?

Very cool... any advice on what album-tagging task I should focus on next?

...but it seems @gchiaren has found a way to tag 'em all up behind the scenes? Everything on the list is now tagged, but the 200 or so items I hadn't gotten to yet don't have any recent updates in their edit history?

Turns out, over a decade+ the community has given us this info in submissions - just in written form! So now we're able to scan submissions and if it says something along the lines of "used this gear in this album" and we're able to match up the album (or single) title, we can automatically tag! It's a great jump-start.

Re: auto-tagging albums where we can: Well played! ::loud high five::

2 Questions:

1. Once albums have their own pages on EB, how will albums be integrated into on-platform search? Right now, for example, when I search for "Nevermind" none of the members of Nirvana (nor the Sex Pistols, for that matter) are surfaced.

2. When are band pages going to be worthy of search-indexing? Example: right now, if I search for "Queen", the first 16 artists returned are not members of Queen AND (more importantly) the Queen band page is not surfaced at all.

yeah, when someone tags gear to an album it should become searchable

Album pages - BETA (lol 😅) - are LIIIIVVEEE!

Aphex Twin - Syro

Nirvana - Nevermind

We say beta jokingly, but not really joking. We realize this is just the v1 start, and we're already underway taking them to the next level. Upcoming improvements:

• Ability to associate "album credits" i.e. what non-band artists worked on the release --> For the initial list we're thinking: Producer, Engineer, Recording Engineer, Mixing Engineer, Mastering Engineer, Programmer, Session Musician
• Making them faster to load --> Aphex Twin's Syro is loading tons of gear all at once so we have to introduce some kind of pagination/loading/infinite scroll type thing to make it snappier
• Letting gear be tagged across multiple albums with multiple sources --> These days it's common for artists to put out "how I made this track" videos. Well if Marsh used Diva on his remix of Eternal Summer, he surely has used Diva on other tracks we want to annotate with gear, so we need to support this (currently an item can only exist once for an artist per source/proof). This is a more complex change, but we're on it!

For now, quietly launching in this forum thread to get initial feedback/reactions/praise/etc so let us hear it!

EDIT: Ah yes and making albums searchable, of course 👀

I'm stoked to see this is moving forward :D.

I was able to load the Syro page for a hot minute, but right now, neither album page is loading for me.

You must be working on something. I'll check back later, but this is a nice way to start the day. Thanks!

This looks great Giulio! I'm really impressed. Are you thinking we'll eventually get down to the song level when there's specific documentation?

OK, pages working great now (thank you!).

Initial Thoughts:

(these are just personal opinions, obviously. Take 'em with a grain of salt)

1. Overall, this aligns with my expectations and is an awesome v1. Album cover image, album info, Artists who worked on the album, then their combined gear -- check, check, check & check. Again, I am so stoked that these pages exist!

2. The Spotify player eats up valuable real estate. I appreciate that you need something colorful an engaging to pull people in, but on both desktop and mobile, I have to scroll down past the player to see anything unique that EB can bring to the table. If I came to any of these album pages as my first taste of EB, I wouldn't really understand why Google sent me here or why someone bothered to share a link until I had done some serious scrolling. I'm assuming that anyone who cares about what gear was used on an album is already pretty familiar with that album -- but this is just an assumption, I've got zero data to back that up.

3. Sorting the gear by artist and by category within each artist feels kind of arbitrary... maybe even tedious. Kurt's Stella acoustic and Aphex Twins' Reddi preamp ARE non-trivial gear from those albums, but neither item is something that you could call a defining piece of the album's overall sound -- they're not the most exciting/revealing pieces of the puzzle. It would be great if there was a way to have the items most associated with and/or most crucial to the album's sound, regardless of which artist they belong to, right at the top of the gear section, then move into whatever sorting schemes make sense for the more boring stuff few are likely to get to. With the current design, for example, I have to scroll through all the different strings and picks the lead guitarist used before I even get to anything related to the bassist, drummer, rhythm guitarist, engineer, producer, etc... there are no easy answers here, but a way to put the most important, most "oh wow", "ha! I knew it!" and "I must add to my wishlist!" stuff front and center would be awesome.

4. The top section with the album artwork needs.... more. Maybe a bigger album artwork image, maybe a dominant/average color background or accent like the Spotify player uses, maybe the Spotify player needs to be shrunken down and inserted into that top section the way the Apple Music player is for artist pages ?... IDK, just throwing out random top-of-mind thoughts, but it needs something to pull me in and make the page feel more album-flavored/album-branded. Edit: album artwork feels right-sized on my phone, actually (nice work!). So I suppose I'm only talking about the desktop-width impression here.

5. The Artists on [album name] section eats up a lot of space. Listing all the artists (and engineers, producers, session players, etc) in a prominent place is important, but something like the more compact components, the ones that can be put into a grid, that are used for artist gear submissions might be a better approach here. Especially once all the technical and session roles get added to album pages.:

https://imgur.com/a/EiXNs9b

Incredible feedback PK, will definitely factor all of this in as we develop this further. Would love to hear anyone else double down on any of PK's suggestions, it would help us know what the biggest pain in the ass things are on this new page!

For now though, we wanted to present the next phase. Check out this gear geekery:

I added renowned producer Peter Katis to the site. I went to one of my fav albums, Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights and associated Katis to the album as a producer, mixer, and engineer. Then, I was able to submit his Telefunken V76 microphone preamps (found an awesome source of him chiming in a forum) and tagged Turn On the Bright Lights since he's now credited on the album.

I mean, how fun is this gonna get 😎

Oof, re-reading what I wrote yesterday... definitely a situation where taking the time to say something simply/succinctly might have been a good investment. I was really shooting from the hip under time pressure. If I were in your shoes, I'd file most of that feedback under "yeah whatever, buddy... let's see if anyone normal agrees". lol.

The stuff I mentioned weeks earlier about the search indexing/integration for albums and bands would definitely be higher on my list. I'm glad to hear that's gonna get some attention.

FYI: I did searches for "gear used on Syro" and "gear used on Nevermind" in DuckDuckGo this AM... the album pages are already hitting the first page of results. Hell yes!