Haha, that’s a surefire way to quickly become everybody’s enemy… No thanks - As I said, I’m for self-moderation - That’s what I personally try to practice, both in real life and here, and I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
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So are we already defunding the police? 
Have to concede that part of my inactivity is the reluctance to deal with the non-music stuff, especially political. I have stayed 100% out of all that since making that clean break however many months ago. I totally hear Andrew’s point about how this forum software can bury threads – it’s not the old style where you had to consciously drive to a category most of the time.
I couldn’t possibly lose the niche that IRD and, previously, RR has played for me, because that’s how I learned to make a recording that is actually listenable. It led to being able to actually write some songs of my own for the first time in my life after having been strictly an interpreter of others’ work. Hard to overstate what that’s meant for me.
So although I do stick to music (and science nerdliness), I know I could be present a whole lot more. That’s about all I can probably offer to help the situation… 
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If you have a forum, that completely relies on one person to bring on the action, then you have problems. This reminds me of the Bad News Bears movie and we lost our only good player. What exactly was this person doing that kept the forums alive? I think I already said too much, and I am not really on there that often. I actually came to listen to a few bashes and see if I could put in any input. But for what it is worth, and hopefully this will be the last thing I say, I came here after being apart of Reddit song writers. There, it like grand central station, no one knows anyone, hundreds of people there , always different people, and it was always the same. Just people giving mostly really good feedback on a song. There was never politics, nothing, just feedback on a song. And I trusted most of those people. You could tell a few really knew what they were talking about. They helped me shape both my sound, and how I would give feedback myself to others. When I came on to this site, I thought it was like that site, but only more refined, more towards the actual process of recording. I made a few comments on a few songs and it felt different. I started reading the other comments and even posted my experience way back. I mentioned that this site at first feels like a close knit party and when you arrive, it felt a little like you were an outsider. You can tell everyone knows everyone and is very friendly, but there was some kind of click feeling to it. Like you have to do something to be in the inner circle. That is when I found myself trying to fit in. I felt like I had to read a lot to see who was who and who everyone was personally. I also felt like the genre was limited to just one kind ish. And I knew my style was not going to be understood maybe and accepted. So I never really wanted to post anything. On Reddit, you just posted, you didnt’ think about it. Within minutes or hours, you have likes and maybe a comment or two if you were lucky. There was the fun of seeing if anyone would like it or not. You could trust the comments and feedback because they didnt know you, they didnt care to kiss up to you or not. So you mostly could really know what the value of your song is and trust the feedback on how to improve. On here, I think when you make connections it has its pluses and minuses. I do think everyone on here is honest, and I think they will tell you what you need to hear. But it still has this stigma of “well thats not hard classic rock”. I grew up in the 80s but never liked classic rock or metal. This seems to be a lot of what is put on here, and I would not really want to put my stuff on here as I don’t think it would be understood. It feels like if you are not a metal or classic rocker, than this site is not really for you. I think that is a genre that is slowly fading away and I think that there are just fewer and fewer people both playing it and listening to it, just as it is with the oldies. It doesn’t mean its not all good stuff, it just means its not popular. I bet if there were some people who were doing rap on here, this board would be lit up. But I also think that if someone posted a rap song, maybe it would not get a lot of feedback. I don’t know for sure, maybe there are a lot of rappers on there posting all the time, and I just have not been here for it. My point to all this is not to Bash this site, my point is to give my first impression of being on here. There may be new people who come on, and then leave because of that. There may be people like me that come on, but shy away from saying too much or posting. I stick to my feeling that the more someone feels uncomfortable, or upset or insulted, the less they want to come around. I do my fair share of insulting for sure, but I never throw a first punch. So I have said all I have to say and I hope this site keeps going, because I really like everyone on here. I used to refer tons of people from other sites and even in person to join here. I stopped once the politics became over the top.
One of my favorite quotes is “if we learn anything from history, it’s that we never learn from history.”
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I’ll see that, and raise you this:
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Hey guys… I would definitely hope that I am not the reason 
.
I happen to peruse at the title today when I got to my home studio computer and saw an RIP thread and my jaw dropped just a little.
But I have been super super busy lately, working on the production team for Rahman is no walk in the park. I did slow down my online music related interactions per contract, its been extremely hard being away but, I do admit, as life gets busier we tend to shrink deeper inside the shell.
I sure hope this site stays. 
Hope every one has been well. I may not be able to interact as much here but I will definitely drop by once in a while. I do miss yall bunches !
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I’ve not been very active either, and I have to say I’m sorry. This site has meant a lot for me. I agree with Andrew and others that the amount of (American) politics running through a lot of threads has not helped a lot. I’m interested in politics (even Aussie politics to some exent ;)), but I’m not looking for political discussion on a music site as pointed out by several of you guys.
But personally, my not having a studio to record anything for almost a year now (and quite a few more months to come) is a bigger cause for not being very active.
So lets talk about music again - please?
I don’t know much about algorithms, but I do know that I love IRD (could’nt resist that one) 
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I think it’s hard to keep a forum alive with conversation only. People need games, challenges, contests, and all sorts of stuff to keep coming back. There’s no real goal that the site is trying to accomplish. there’s no fanfare, no ultimate guide to stuff, no secrets the pros don’t want you to know. There’s nothing to keep people invested. There aren’t really even any articles that I know of.
The problem is that it takes real dedicated work, and some money, and a bit of vision to really pull that off, and I’m not sure that anybody cares enough to do all that. It’s a lot of work, and requires pushing through the hard times.
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How does a contest work in the world of plugins? Do you need to guarantee a certain number of website hits to get a company to do a giveaway?
I agree that you need more than just conversation to keep a site going. There has to be something in it for both sides of the equation to put the effort in.
Maybe we should develop an IRD seal of approval for a variety of categories, such as music that passed the Bash This Recording test, plug-ins recommended by the site, gear for home recording, etc. to try and whip up some interest. The site could put out a Best of IRD recording on all the free platforms to draw attention. I’m sure everyone has a pile of useless ideas like me, but at some point all the members came here for a reason. I hate to see the place become a 4th guitar; all nice and shiny and great sounding, in a case in a closet never getting played.
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I think there’s some good ideas right there.
The IRD seal of approval (SOA). Maybe a BTR song would be required to meet a certain standard of quality. By creating a list of criteria that a song/ recording needs to pass. The community could vote, assess and give a number rating out of 10, or for more precision, 100. A general overall group assessment would be reflected in the number that a recording receives. Maybe a passing grade would be any number over 75 % or 80 %. The criteria for the recordings would be things like, timing, pitch, performance, sound quality (is it muddy, overly bright, lacking depth and that 3D quality, ….basically is it professionally passable?). I think everyone here will want to know if their recordings are at least are approaching professional standards. Once a song and recording crosses the line from amateur to professional that would give the person some sense of accomplishment, confidence, and satisfaction. A scoring system that every member can participate in would give a general consensus. Of course there is no purely objective way of scoring a song and recording, but perfection is not the point. Participation and engagement is the point……and growing as a musician, home engineer/ producer and writer. Assessing and judging our work is important for our growth and development. We all assess and inspect our own work to produce the best stuff we can, but having others assessing and judging our work is very useful and enlightening too.
I think your idea about putting out a Best Of IRD compilation could be a real good plan, too. I had thought about things like that before after hearing some of the great original songs and recordings on here. A few times I had thought about starting a thread specifically about that but I got lazy and chickened out.
I was thinking of proposing the idea with this vision……something like
this…….
We all know that there have been multiple music scenes throughout the world in different cities, in certain eras. There was the Hippie scene in California that spawned a group of bands….Other people here will know much more about that than I do. A lot of it centred around San Francisco and LA, I think.
There was the New York City scene back in the early to late seventies, with bands like The New York Dolls and others. In the 80’s the big “Hair Metal” scene developed in Los Angeles with bands like Motley Crüe, RATT, and tons of other famous or somewhat successful bands. In the late 80’s and early 90’s there was a big explosion in the Seattle music scene with bands like Nirvana and multitudes of others from around that area (often referred to as the Grunge scene). There’s been many, many more scenes throughout the world, throughout history, also.
………
So, what if a website attempted to create their own music scene?? As individual artists, bands, and entities we have a small bit of power and opportunity, but what if a group of people got together to share their resources, strengths and ambitions to actually create a popular, successful music scene. This scene wouldn’t originate in one geographical location, it would include people from all over the world and it would be virtual, ONLINE. As individuals we could all feed off this virtual scene to further the reach of our music and the success of our musical ambition. I doubt very much that most of us write and record music for the purpose of never being heard and appreciated. Just the fact that this site and others like it exist, suggests that us creators and musicians are looking for something more, something greater. Maybe we can have it, if we worked together. There’s power in numbers!
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I certainly wouldn’t call them useless ideas, I’m inspired!
All these ideas would have to be worked out of course. Personally I’ve enjoyed the ‘bashing’ of the songwriting side as usefull too. Or, not just useful. Writing songs is often deeply personal but there is rarely anybody in your direct neighbourhood really interested in your lyrics, song structure, chord sequences, etc… So when someone that you can trust gives you serious feedback, it’s also a piece of recognition for something that is increadibly important to you as a songwriter. That’s big! Even if your recordings may not reach that pro level! Yet another subject we could build on.
The issue is that some one has to take the lead and invest serious time (and probably money I guess?) to make this work. If the site is big enough it may generate enough revenues to make this possible, but before you get this far, some one will need to take a very deep plunge. It it worthwhile investigating the business side of things together to see if we can somehow make it work? Or can we come up with a way of making this site without a leader work for us without all the investments?
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Doesn’t sound so bad. I’ve gone out of my way to learn all things New Zealand because we had an active Kiwi on the site.
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[quote=“ingolee, post:17, topic:5903”]
I think we all remember Brandon Drury. He was an active, hands on, involved manager. There was always something going on, promotions, clinics, videos, contests, that’s how you bring in members and keep them involved. If you want this forum to continue I think that’s what has to happen here and it has to come from the top. @holster is a great guy but he needs to either get involved on a daily basis or else sell this forum to someone else who will.
BINGO. We have a winner!!!
And I’ll add that censorship was ridiculously minimal. Brandon could and did encourage debate without fostering animosity.
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I agree with this. Even if Bryan is relatively hands-off at this point, there’s still value in this thing because it’s running on a web endpoint, it doesn’t crash or get viruses, and the code infrastructure is stable. The technical part is taken care of. I agree that everything else comes down to what the community decides to do with it.
James, up to this point, it’s been Me, Dave, and Andrew, with Boz and Bryan contributing additional input as needed. I don’t know that any of the 5 of us has the time or desire to be a official IRD cop. But for what it’s worth, I can’t think of a time though where someone had a real serious complaint about the way they were treated and we just blew it off. I think by the time it got to where someone needed to be banned, we acted. I’m nowhere near as active as I used to be, but for me personally, it never got to the point where I quit caring all together.
Same here. When I quit playing/recording/mixing full time it really put a dent in how much value it felt I could contribute here.
Between the moderators, I was in the minority of us that thought political discussions were healthy. I WAS WRONG.
I believed that dialogue around politics and world views were part of ones artistic expression and the ‘voice’ of those ideals was what feeds the drive to create music for some. I saw value in this, but the others realized long before I did that the long term damage it created far outweighed the benefits, because I truly, desperately, blindly hoped WANTED to believe this forum could figure out how to self-moderate it’s political discussions. To EVERYONE here, I apologize for my lack of insight on this.
Bob… I’m sorry… the ‘referees’ here are not going to get involved unless someone flags a thread. People here have to flag us because I assure you, the active refs here will have been ignoring those threads long before they get out of hand.
…and on the ‘off limits’ topics, I completely 100% agree with you, but it HAS NOT worked the way we would wanted it to.
@ingolee… I’m not being sarcastic, or condescending, or derogatory saying this, but this forum is not sellable because it’s not worth anything. This forum does not have $1 of salable value right now. I think Bryan’s contributions are still contributing substantial value for the reasons I stated to @ColdRoomStudio… if that is the extent of what he’s willing to contribute, personally, I’m MORE than happy to accept that, because it’s more than I could contribute to the technical infrastructure of the codebase right now even if I had to.
oooooh… I gotta disagree… people had challenges here. Tons of them… every single time someone stated anything political, it sure as hell got ‘challenged’. And then when we tried to dissuade this, that also got challenged.
The problem is WHAT we challenged was completely irrelevant to what people came here for. The ‘challenge’ of making writing a song, making a track, researching a plugin, mastering a technique… that all points to relevance more than it points to incentive to engage. Wouldn’t you say?
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Because that’s how debate and discussion works. In order to express an opinion, you have to accept that someone, somewhere might be offended. Offending someone isn’t a crime, it’s just life. If we all we went through life biting our tongues for fear of offending people no productive discourse would ever take place.
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well, that’s not really what I meant by challenges. I mean things like “Write a 30 second jingle in this style,” or “Create the hardest hitting drums.” Small little challenges to push people to try new things.
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I hope it doesn’t die I just got here! 
I got a lot of good mix feedback on what I posted before, and I like this smaller community feel than say, reddit. I just haven’t been able to work on music at all lately as real life has dragged me away. But when I do I would stop by here.
Someone said games. Mafia’s always fun, VOTE: Mafia
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I seem to remember some RR members calling Brandon Drury the supreme leader on that site. It takes a lot drive , energy and ambition to do what he did, so the “Supreme Leader” title was kind of suitable. It would probably be difficult to find someone who is up to the job for IRD because of the effort required. BUT, maybe it’s possible to pool together a group of IRD members to spread out the work. Maybe a group of 12 or so members, with each member assigned a particular job. We could even have little teams assigned to particular tasks so that the individuals have support and aren’t overwhelmed.
I’m not really sure how a successful and workable system would be devised, but my guess is that like anything else the first step is to start implementing one single thing at a time and gradually develop a system as we go. Us IRD members will develop ideas as we move forward.
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I, like many others, check in just about every day.
Personally, I am one of those folks who drift in and out periodically, due to life just being busy.
There are several factors for me:
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Back in the Recording Review Days, I was at the bottom of the learning curve. RR and that forum, the 12 month mixing comp helped me immeasurably! I have probably reached a point now where I am pretty comfortable with my mixing (even though I’m never happy, but when are we!!!) and there simply isn’t the depth of conversation here around those kinds of topics.
Mind you, I have now learned to identify and ignore the irrelevant noise of “Which mic should I use?” and “Should you only cut and not boost EQ?” questions.
Not that there is anything wring with those questions. Hell, I spent a long time reading and listening to such topics and lapped it up. But when time poor, you find that simply doing it and learning what works is the best way.
I’m not saying “I’m amazing and no-one here can teach me anything”, it’s more I have limited time and so I’m cherry picking my topics.
We’re also not seeing those kinds of discussions here either. That could be because most members are competent and comfortable with their skills, or likely more so, YouTube and the like is much easier to learn from than through the forum. -
Life/Work/Music/Family balance is always hard, as it is for all of us. I’ve been fortunate enough to be making a lot of music the last few years (a lot comparatively for me, anyway). I am absolutely guilty of coming back when I need something bashed but feel I pay enough back by listening and commenting to as many BTR’s as I can in those times. I am not sure this will change for me. If there are no recording/mixing conversations/questions going on, then BTR is all I can contribute to. There is no way I am getting in to political, religious or similar conversations here. I see this place as a supportive place to grow and fuel our passion. That, to me, is irrelevant to why I check in.
I sincerely hope the forum stays up. I’ll continue to lurk in the background and spring back when I want to do some bashing or need some bashing. I’ll have every intention of staying and contributing more, but if I’m honest, I’ll likely disappear again for a few months before repeating the process!!!
Worth discussing!
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I agree!! Especially with the notion of ‘productive discourse’. Ones of the issues here was that the discourse wasn’t exactly productive. The stuff around US politics had devolved into a mud-slinging full-brawl pissing contest, and people were taking the personal attacks way way too far. To the point it served no purpose and just made the whole place a drain on people’s morale.
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