gchiaren's forum posts 789

bump... you should sticky this

Good idea, stickied.

I'll start. I think the community gear photo gallery is amazing and criminally under-exposed. We quietly added the ability for gear photos to be tagged, and it looks like most folks have been using that so now we can tell what's a pedalboard setup, what's a studio pic, etc. We can use that to disseminate those photos on more portions of the site. You're looking at Billy Corgan's Big Muff? Tycho's Virus synth? Cool, how about some beautiful pedalboards and studio setups from the community further down the page where you can admire and learn what other gear people are using with their Big Muff & Virus?

Ok fixed... I hope? Lemme know :)

Thanks guys will keep you updated in this thread.

ps. We've noticed the inconsistency in the thumbnails sizing, we'll fix that asap.

I've actually been trying to fix that myself...

Meaning, by re-uploading your photos? No need to do that, it's a little bug on our end, we intend to fix it today :)

One thing the Equipboard team has been scratching their heads over is how to give gear photos more exposure within the community.

If you haven't looked at the gallery lately it's pretty awesome. A great way to pick up some GAS, that's for sure...

Since many users that upload a gear photo also tag their gear, we decided to expand the item image carousel - where a product's stock photos are shown - with also showing gear photos where that product has been tagged.

The Boss BD-2 Blues Driver is a good example, where you can see it as part of pedalboard setups.

The Teenage Engineering OP-1 is part of some awesome setups as well.

Excited to hear what you all think and as always we're open to feedback!

ps. We've noticed the inconsistency in the thumbnails sizing, we'll fix that asap.

Let the upvote party begin!! _0/

What if Equipboard integrated a Reverb shop?

Expand on that. What do you mean?

You're quite observant! We've soft-launched it, but we're gonna start selling plugins and software :) https://equipboard.com/store

You rock, thanks for noticing & thanks for the feedback! 🤙

More coming :)

Update: I forwarded this thread to Void Acoustics, as a datapoint for future Marketing efforts, and they hooked me up with a nice t-shirt. Arrived today. Nice folks!

Late to the party, but that's so cool!

Wow that one on Reverb's so sweet 😍

Ok, here's the dilemma. There's a category under DJ Gear that's called Electronic Music. For several obvious reasons, that makes little to no sense as a gear category!

Under "Electronic Music" we have:

1. Drum Machines
2. Tabletop Synthesizers
3. Audio Samplers
4. Audio Sequencers

Ok so here's the dilemma -- there's already a category called Production & Groove under:

Musical Instruments / Keyboards, Synthesizers & MIDI / Production & Groove

Does it make sense to move 1-4 up there under Production & Groove, and delete Electronic Music? Any other solution that we can all agree on will be considered.

This is now live. Filtering can be sloowwwww... we'll work on making it snappier, but at least it's possible now :)

So I finally got around to looking at the first submissions queue. Hurts to look at.

It would be nice if there were a filter system at the top (similar to the "artists needing gear" page). The tags could be based on gear category (DJ gear, music software, etc). I bring this up because producer/DJ gear is my personal strong suit when it comes to identifying gear, which allows me to be more efficient about checking the quality of first submissions. Others on here are gonna have different strong suits (e.g. guitar pedals & effects).

Understood. Would it help if we just did the same filtering by role like on the "artists needing gear" page? Filtering based on gear categories is a little trickier because there are so many of them. Instead you could filter the artists in the first submissions queue by role. So in your case you select producer & DJ, and the submissions to sift through should contain gear you are more familiar with.

Hmm, good thoughts. I'm looking at Sweetwater's categorization, it looks like they have:

• 4-string Bass Guitars
• 5-string Bass Guitars
• 6+ string Bass Guitars
• Fretless Bass Guitars

We could stick those under Electric Basses... but it looks like Sweetwater assumes electric by default. So the options we have are:

1. Add those four under Electric Basses or
2. Do away with Electric Basses, and place the above four categories directly underneath Bass Guitars.

Any preference?

There are people that still want to know what kind of MPC, DAW, monitors, console and mics Missy Elliott and Timbaland used on "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" 24 years ago... but good luck finding someone who still cares about what brand of lipstick she wore in that's song's video...

Precisely.

Alton Brown's knife still sounds pretty cool, though.

To eyesee's point, yeah, that is cool information. But if someone were to come up and tell me "I want to do Equipboard but with the gear chefs use" I would suggest to do it on a simple Wordpress and not to quit the day job :) Reason being, you quickly run out of celebrity chefs with enough clout where people care about their gear. And even then, a pretty large percentage of searchers are looking for those chefs' signature lines (they all have one), not necessarily what they actually use. The numbers get pretty small pretty quickly. Still, would probably be a cool blog!

post-launch hard data + anecdotal evidence steered the micro-pivot/intensified focus

I mean, yeah, that's pretty much it! If you want to know from a business standpoint, I have no doubt you could launch WhatIskKimKardashianWearingToday dot com, update it with every TMZ photo that comes out of her, and possibly make a buck or two. But to achieve scale, you need to attract a community that is passionate and will talk about a subject for the love.

Hah, memory lane. Equipboard started off as an idea that might unfold much like reddit did. People have many different interests, so we thought they might want to know what different pros use across categories.

And while that's true, it gained traction with musicians the fastest, and with Michael and I being musicians ourselves and passionate about gear, we started to be able to see the "big picture" early on. Plus, with limited resources it helped to focus on one thing - trying to be too many things to too many people has sunk many websites early on.

It's not that we didn't test other categories - but we found there is something magical and timeless that happens in the music gear world. Since the love of music (and how it's made) is this thing that transcends boundaries and unites us all, both the gear and the pro have sort of this timeless aspect to them - and that magic is part of what makes Equipboard work so well.

More details please! How are they written? Recorded in a DAW or chords/lyrics on paper?

Also, by “easy way” is it a personal issue like they might judge you, or do you mean you physically don’t know how to show them?

Mods and/or admins can get artists added for you, provided they meet the notability guidelines. Who would you like added?

Quick update for item categorization: We ended up getting rid of the Amplifiers & Effects category, and instead split it into two top-level categories: Amplifiers, and Guitar Pedals & Effects.

I think we had originally been inspired by the way Musician's Friend grouped products in their catalogue, but more and more bundling together Amplifiers & Effects didn't make sense. Either a musician is looking/shopping for an amp, OR an effect. They are very different things, for different uses, at very different price-points.

Please take note of this change as you're categorizing new or existing items.

Thanks for the heads up. The jpg image itself had some weirdness, one of my image editors refused to open it. I ended up opening it and re-saving it as a jpg and that worked!

email? people still use email for things other than work and managing their iLok etc?

Equipboard's volume of email is actually quite absurd.

Ok, performance issues improved... I hope!?

And yeah pkennethk you pretty much nailed it regarding the way it works under the hood. Regarding who is asking, our email volume is pretty high. We try to direct questions, complaints, and feedback to the forum here but many still prefer to speak to us in private ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Hmm, thanks for the feedback. Alright I shall take a look.

A lot of users around here love gear-spotting, and even more so when they're doing so for an artists that have yet to be filled out. Well, by popular demand, in the review page there's a new queue:

Artists Needing Gear

These artists - filterable by whatever roles & genres you want - are being searched for, yet are a bit light on gear, and need your expert eyes and ears to populate them.

Give it a try, and as always if there are any obvious improvements we could make to it we'd love to hear about them. Happy gear hunting!

Haha gonna overtake Mac Demarco or deadmau5??

Hi everyone! Hope your December is kicking off well. Just a quick update from the Equipboard team --

Every user now has access to the Review Queue up in the nav bar:

https://i.imgur.com/pf1LPWc.png

This is where we'll put queues related to helping improve the site.

And speaking of, we made a new queue called First Submissions - all the un-reviewed submissions made by first time contributors. We encourage everyone to help out a few first-timers and rate some subs!

As the pointers say at the top of that queue, BE NICE, and BE MINDFUL! If a submission is a complete disaster and it's obvious the user is trying to mess around, no need for insults; simply mark it as "Completely Incorrect" and move on.

Also submissions site wide will now be marked with a "FIRST TIME SUBMITTER" tag up by the username:

https://i.imgur.com/eVGx1F2.png

As always we welcome any and all feedback!

Again, here's the new First Submissions queue.

Thanks for the rec. Link is here: https://www.spitfireaudio.com/bbcso/

The ability to hide the expensive and/or vintage items when sending it out. I wouldn't be at all comfortable with anyone in my life spending big $$$ on some shiny new thing and I wouldn't want anyone other than me dealing with buying a 30 year old drum machine off Reverb... so many questions one must ask about condition, service history, etc.

That's a really great idea. A "hide this when sharing" flag for each item in your wishlist. It shall be implemented!

Are you proposing that tags would be per-artist rather than database-wide?

Yes exactly, per artist (or more specifically per specific submission). It could be part of a larger tagging system that would include things like "Used live," "Used in studio," and whatever else might be interesting.

We had a case where Fender Jimi Hendrix strings were submitted to Jimi Hendrix's page. Members of the community jumped on and flagged it as completely incorrect, but I wanted to bring up an idea.

Could this type of thing be solved with a tagging system for submissions? Via tagging, I'm thinking a submission like the one in question can be tagged as "Sponsored" or "Tribute" (or we can come up with a better word for it).

We know there is a portion of people who visit the Hendrix page to get encyclopedic knowledge of what exactly he used, but I also think a portion of people would see these strings as a sort of "sound like Hendrix" option. After all, there's a reason signature gear is created posthumously.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

I love the new button!

Cheers for the feedback. Would love to hear more. What do you like about it specifically?

I think that sounds like a pretty good idea *´ . .. and would actually save time!

Even something like a "price alert" for items in our wishlist might be cool. So if I'm looking for (example) a Polyend Tracker and I want to know when the price drops below like $540/10% off, EB could shoot me a notification.

I know implementing anything like this is non-trivial, assuming some version of it is even possible... but there is a lot of power in housing our "to buy" lists, and the APIs for Reverb and others probably allow for some cool ways to make this feature more valuable to us, EB, and retailers all at the same time.

You guys nailed it. This is such a no-brainer in terms of a feature Equipboard should have. Not revolutionary, but definitely a necessary evolution.

As you probably see in your wishlists, the primary New sources are Sweetwater and Amazon, and the primary Used source is Reverb. We're able to update prices often - nightly for instance - so I think price alerts based on a threshold you are able to set makes so much sense.

I have a pretty solid wishlist at the moment, but inevitably I get busy and I don't go back often enough to comb through it for deals/price drops. That's definitely something Equipboard could and should do for me (i.e. email me), we have the tech to make it happen.

It's in the works. Open to more discussion around what would make curating your Equipboard wishlist better. What features would you need to be able to email it out to your friends & family during the holidays and feel good about doing so?

Yeah, good idea. I think we're trying to get our thoughts in order with gear photos in general. There are so many awesome ones coming in, and it doesn't feel like we're exposing them to the best of our ability around the site.

We have some ideas to improve their exposure, and we'll make sure to add a way to re-order them when we do so.

It happened again.

Jim's right it does happen all the time. As I said earlier, I think we need to fundamentally rethink the process of adding a new artist profile. What we're leaning towards is keeping part of the current process where it lists some possible matches and you have to select if it's one of those.

However, right now we allow users to say None of these, I prefer to add manually. This will go away. Instead, we'll say, None of these? Please enter a Spotify link or WikiData link for the artist you're trying to add.

That way, the manual option goes away, and we're more assured of the artist's legitimacy by them being on either MusicBrainz, Spotify, or WikiData.

Does that make sense?

I think I was able to fix it. WEIRD bug, good catch. Try adding Elvin Jones again. I promise Equipboard loves jazz! Miles Davis radio is a go-to station on whatever streaming app I happen to have handy at the time 😁

Strange. We’ll take a look and get back to you!

We're moving towards utilizing MusicBrainz, Spotify, and Wikidata to help us better structure our artist data.

We're considering making it a requirement that an artist has to have a presence on one of those 3 services in order to be added as a community-editable artist page.

Is it perfect? No. I think anyone can put themselves on Spotify. But at least we would be making it more difficult to bend the rules...

https://equipboard.com/items/sunn-concert-lead

this sunn concert lead has a picture of a guytron tube amp....I tried to put up a picture of a concert lead and it saved, said it was successful and is stillshowing the wrong amp.

These items do save successfully but there's a caching issue. The server likes to hang onto a cached version of the old image, so it makes it look like nothing changed. This is a weird one, I'll take a look...