Add New Forum for Gear - Recommendations and Reviews

[StyleOverShow]

First, thanks for TB. Except for dinging me hard (PACMAN) for a little political humor (naively posting candidates names/images), I have found this site to be entirely rewarding and even endearing at times (MM questions are sometimes profound).

So much of the traffic is 'recommend me' (sic) a whatever, which is useful enough the first 10 times you read it. I think you could clean some of this stuff up with the addition of a few new forums that are slightly different than the current style, and I think your advertisers would like it too.

If you compiled the polls and profiled the responses, e.g. top 3 effect pedals (a real example from my own experience) and posted them in a sticky by type of music, Rock, jazz, Blues, Latin, Worship for instance, you could amass a knowledge base that was more of a matrix than a series of search results. That would be helpful. It would need to be updated from time to time as new equipment rolled out, but you get the idea.

I came to this idea after searching for strings, easy enough because there is a forum/sub-forum on Strings. But when it came to Gear Bags, it was Misc or Recording and Gear? I started a thread and someone kindly enough sent along a picture of their load out complete with wheeled device (similar to my setup but with nicer bags). Bought a Mesa Gear Bag with the next gig's proceeds and began to use velcro on music stand blade affixing it to my speaker cabinet.

After a loud practice with a 'new' band last night I went looking for the earplugs thread that I remembered reading a while ago.

In my proposed scheme this would be found under: Rock (loudest of the types) - Gear (not instrument or string related) - Ear Plugs - ranked by responses in the polls (I ordered the Etymotic ER20's for the short term). The gear bag, gig bags, orange oil, finger-ease would be ranked here. Think Amazon.com.

Maybe this whole idea goes against the free flow of thoughts, and there are many such streams on TB, but give it a whirl and see what you think?