Performance videos and if / where / when they should be posted

[tommo]

Thanks for the clarifications Troy, it all makes sense! Luckily I did get very useful feedback on the thread I mentioned, hopefully making it at least barely legal , but I do see how the best format for technique critique is short clips that are to-the-point.

@Troy

More generally, if you’re saying, can we have a forum section where people can post covers because they think others here might want to discuss them in some fashion, sure, we can think about that. I would leave that up to all of you to discuss.

I was wondering if the “introduce yourself” section could be a good place to share one’s performances (covers, originals, lessons etc.). It would be nice to accompany videos with some technical comments e.g. on how challenging parts are played, or more generally how the “Cracking the Code concepts” have been applied - and of course this could still be a way to get constructive feedback.

I know that I personally would enjoy both making and reading these types of posts - and as I mentioned in the past, looking at people’s hands is my favourite way to learn songs. But again, I see the potential for unsustainability if we all post dozens of videos per week

As you say it’s good to leave this open for discussion for now, so here is a rudimentary poll:

Is it a good idea to share performances in the “Introduce yourself” section, for technical discussion and feedback?

• Yes
• No

[Brendan]

Hey! A few thoughts on this, not a definitive answer from us as a team (I’m actually out of town / typing this from my phone for fun haha) just how I think about it personally—

I think it will always be contextual and we can consider kind of a spectrum of “types of videos users may want to post”. On the one side are things that are most obviously non-problematic and a perfect fit for this forum. This would include of course #technique-critique posts. I’d also say another example of this would be a case where you develop some cool idea in discussions here e.g. [my personal fretboard navigation system / how I think about pick thickness / my crosspicking practice regimen] and then make a video to better illustrate it, and then want to post to further the conversation. I think this sort of thing could be posted as its own topic in the category it pertains to (eg playing technique or gear or harmony/theory) with links back to relevant previous discussions as well as commentary / questions to continue the conversation.

On the opposite side would be something like, hey, I’m making a series of fifty videos on [my favorite EVH solos / coolest guitar designs / something else random in the context of discussion on this particular forum] and I’m gonna post a video every day for the next month or two with no further explanation and bump the same topic repeatedly so everyone on the forum sees it even though it’s not actually teaching people anything or participating in the larger conversation here. I think something like that — or even one video rather than fifty, if it has the same lack of context / low effort in actually being a conversation — falls clearly on the spammy side of the spectrum.

In between there’s a large grey area and a lot that would be very context dependent. I think what you described above, sharing lessons / performances with technical commmentary, could definitely be done in an appropriate way and would be cool to see. I don’t think these would always belong in #introduce-yourself though — a video or two that actually serves as intro / “here’s the sort of thing I like to play” is great. But a lesson or something I’d think would better fit as is own topic in the relevant category. I think we risk topics getting bloated and fragmented if new stuff keeps getting appended to a single discussion — it can work for something like #technique-critique where the new video actually updates progress on what’s been discussed previously. But I think less appropriate to have a topic that’s like “my personal mega-thread for sharing all the cool stuff I do”. In any case I think the basic most important heuristic for anything along these lines is whether we can tell if there’s intent to learn and share and discuss together vs just drive-by link-dropping. As long as that’s the case we can make sure it ends up organized in the right place etc

[tommo]

Today I seem to cause the splitting of threads, I should be more careful

Thanks Brendan, again this makes sense! In view of the points you and Troy made I now think that my initial poll above is a bit naive and doesn’t really capture the “complexity of the problem”!

Sometimes I just post stuff without thinking enough first. But I hope that in any case this discussion was useful to others in the same way it was to me.

[SylvSylv]

I am interested by the team’s choice regarding this subject. I’ve been reshaping my playing since I discovered CtC in 2014, and would very much like to show everyone the songs I’ve crafted with that new picking-hand, guitar video with picking-hand close-up. I don’t wan’t to do shameless plugs, but more so giving motivation to everybody who might like it. IMO it belongs here because I’ve thought through every single riffs picking-hand wise, and it all makes sense for CtC adepts.

[Brendan]

I think what Troy wrote earlier—

New Cracking the Code forum guidelines!

Intent matters. The purpose of “Technique Critique” is to get feedback on your playing. If there is some specific thing you want feedback on, and it just happens to be a part of a song you recorded, sure. If it’s, ok, I took that advice, and now I can do that thing differently, here is an example of how that advice worked for me on this phrase which occurs at such-and-such time marker of this cover tune I recorded, I think that’s fine too - because it’s a follow-up and relevant to the origin…

—and what I posted above still mostly capture our current thoughts on this.

We don’t have a specific category for posting lessons or performances, but also don’t have hard and fast rules prohibiting this kind of thing, other than wanting to avoid posts that seem intended more for self-promotion than meaningful discussion.

I think the sort of think you mention here sounds fine as long as it demonstrates wanting to spark actual conversation rather than just pasting a YouTube link and saying “hey check this out”. If you want to include a bit about your experience learning / creating the song, explanation of the technique(s) it features, any questions or feedback you might be interested in, etc. I think that would go a long way toward making a post clearly discussion-oriented.

EDIT: As far as where this might go…I think for now it could go in #playing-technique if it pertains specifically to demonstrating technique you’ve learned, or perhaps in #general-music-discussion if the intended discussion is about something other than technique. I’d also suggest posting no more than say one of this sort of thing per month. In the future we may add a more specific category / further guidelines as needed. Thanks!

[tommo]

For what it’s worth, I’d be very interested in looking at songs/etudes written by other forummers and based on specific techniques. A bit like a continuation of what Troy did with the “Down around the world” collection.

EDIT: one simple thing we can do to share stuff not directly relevant to the forum is to put a link to our website/youtube page in our profile. Then this can be viewed by others by clicking on the profile picture of the user you are interested in.

[JonJon]

my 2 cents. I wanna see clips of people playing…especially the closeups of the picking hand. In a larger sense, that is sort of Troys whole trademark thing. In my mind it would follow that this forum would be chocked full of clips of members playing

Pretty much the whole reason why I joined this forum was to get help figuring out the whole camera thing lol. I deffo wanna get into the mix of posting clips and getting feedback.

Even if someone posted for no other reason than to “show off”…whats the harm? Anyone ever heard of VH1? A whole album of showing off lol. If there is a 21 yr old Eddie or Yngwie out there and they join this forum…I wanna see dozens of their clips.

The whole “spamming to promote someones own business” or whatever. yeah I understand the concern…but wont it be obvious when it happens?? Some guy joins and his first post is some pro clip with pro lighting and he is linking to his page of available courses. Yeah, but wont that be pretty obvious?

Id like to see a section strictly for people showing their skills and obviously it will flow from there if people like the clip and ask them about the techniques etc. One way to do this would be to have a “players diary” section where a guy can post 19 million clips if he wants to. its his diary and he can spam himself to death if he wants. If Yngwie comes here and starts a diary ill watch every clip. If Joe beginner starts a diary, more power to him…he can post a million clips of whatever and it wont really clog the section up because its just his own diary post. Its not a separate post for every clip.

Some feedback from a singing forum I used to be on. (notice I say “used to be.”) I joined the forum when I started studying singing. I had high hopes. Aww man I was really gonna learn from the pros etc etc. Well I did learn quickly and lo and behold I got to be a pretty good singer. (yes, its subjective lol)

Well the way that particular forum was setup, one had to actually PAY for a “critique.” Well it was no problem for me because I went ahead and paid for a lifetime membership. Long story short, it got to be a real drag because no one was really posting any singing clips lol. So it got to be just a lot of talking. All the regulars…yada yada yada. Long intense arguments around terminology. Everyone TALKED a good game but could they sing to back up the talk?? Some of them I never heard sing at all lol. So how was I supposed to know who’s advice was backed up by reality??

That forum had a lot of good singers sort of pass thru and keep going. The setup killed it and IMO its dead as can be now. We would have a conversation going and it would have been natural to go “hold on, lemme post a clip of what I mean”…but the forum setup sort of prevented it.

Another thing that killed it and other singing forums as well, was that the forums tend to be FIERCELY protective. No discussion of any other singing programs allowed. Kind of sucks because most of us dipped our toes in numerous programs. Nope, you’re on my forum so you gotta use my terminology and u cant mention other programs. lol. Yeah, real healthy in the long run

I think its a bit artificial to sort of try to force most clips into “technique critique”. Sometimes a guy might wanna post because he feels he has sort of newly mastered a technique and maybe he wants to help others etc. If people are gonna spam, they will spam anyway like “gee guys im worried if my technique is right” and then dude blasts off some long pro line of sequenced arpeggios lol.

Im the new guy here but my ideal forum/community situation would be somewhere cool to hang out and have cool discussions and lots of back and forth and sharing of our talents and helping others etc. If u get a strong group of players who encourage and push each other and share their techniques etc, its going to pull the whole group up.

What better advertisement for Troys products than to be able to say 'We have the coolest AND strongest forum online" lol

Just some thoughts off the top of my head

Peace, JJ

[Drew]

Good lord, that’s a long post from a phone!

I’m a little split on this… On one, negative, hand, I’d hate to see this become another forum where people drive by and post “hey, our new album just dropped, check out our new playthrough video!” and - doubly so since we have different topic areas for posts in this forum software, but it doesn’t separate them into different subforums, so they all come out together in the forum feed - see the forum gradually get choked up with people spamming their projects for yooutube or soundcloud clicks.

On the other… There are some talented players around here, and - and maybe this is the differentiator, within the context of a community - it can be kind of cool to hear what the other members here are up to musically, what their influences are, what sort of stuff they write, etc. And, I’m just starting to gear up to get to work on another album so this is a long way off… but when I DO finish it, it’ll be kind of cool to share it here and talk about some of the songs, influences, technical approaches, etc, especially in that this is going to be a hyper analytical group given the nature of this site, haha. So, I definitely get wanting to share music with other members here, as well as wanting to hear what others are up to. I guess as I write this it’s kind of becoming implicitly clear that I’d generally be more interested in checking out original music by other members, rather than covers, the more I think abotu this.

Idunno. I’m not voting for now because I’m not sure there’s a clear right answer. That does remind me though that I’ve got an hour to kill at work on an early release day while I wait for the friend I’m meeting for drinks after work to get out, and I’ve been meaning to do some listening in the member original music thread…

[JonJon]

my post?? phone? nah, they used to have these things called laptops and some of us old folks still have them

original stuff? yeah ive probably got 15-20 originals online (varying demo quality…some done in one day only etc) but ive been pretty lazy on writing/recording all year. Ive been working the lead guitar and singing chops quite a bit though.

MY lead chops are so much better now that Im not even going to bother posting any of my existing originals lol. Some of yall may have already heard them lol

It takes a huge effort to write and record originals but if I can figure out the camera setup im sure I could contribute some nice detailed lick vids etc

[charface]

I think it would be nice to have a trading licks section as long as there was no bashing.

For me guitar has always been about swapping info.

I think you already have a great platform, why have people go elsewhere for that interaction.

But,
I get that it could become an issue policing another section and people might give questionable info.

Im on the fence. Lol

[Drew]

my post?? phone? nah, they used to have these things called laptops and some of us old folks still have them

Brandon’s post, lol.

[tommo]

Reading all the above, I think it would be great if in the future the forum could have a “performance area” as well as a “learning area” - in a way that the two don’t interefere with each other and we don’t have a million performance videos bumped to the top of the list at the expense of the didactic material/discussions.

I think the “CTC approach” really works, and it would be nice to have a place where we share the technical/musical improvements we are able to make thanks to it. If done right, this may even help to promote the material to a wider audience (look at my gains in only 3months! - kind of thing haha).

@Brendan I do realise the CTC team is busy doing a million things - and big changes like this may take a lot of work / not be compatible with the infrastructure you are using. I think the website is already great - this would just make me even more spoiled

[Brendan]

Hey all thanks for the continued discussion on this!

@JonJon agree we should be encouraging diverse playing / technique examples and it would be great to have a more clear place for people to post this stuff. And it seems there is a good amount of interest in a place to do that outside of #technique-critique. I’ll think about some simple guidelines we could have to make such a forum category as useful as possible. Maybe it could be called “Show and Tell” or something like that.

I like the “diary” idea though I also think over time it can lead to indefinite mega-topics with hundreds of posts where it can become harder to read / contribute (we’ve seen a few of these in the past) so I’d be inclined to encourage a new topic for each thing, with maybe some reasonable limit on frequency per user. And I’d want to make sure these sorts of posts still encourage substantive discussion; while I don’t disagree in general with posts just to show off, I think a big part of what makes this forum special is the focus on learning, so might be worth having a guideline like “please add some context, question(s), or discussion prompt with each post.”

@Drew haha yes long phone post indeed; may have been passenger in a long car ride at the time Good points here, I think for any new category we may add, will be important to establish some clear guidelines, and make it feel like a community thing rather than a place for dropping random links. Thinking out loud, this forum does have a concept of trust levels that can give users certain privileges after being on here a while (stuff you may not ordinarily notice e.g. limits on post frequency and flagging for new users vs. regulars)…one idea could be somehow limiting posting in certain categories to users who have been here a while? Not sure if that’s the best solution but one thing we could consider.

@tommo this is more power user territory and something I haven’t even used personally, but the forum does have a section in your user preferences where you can set some fairly specific category preferences! May be worth playing around with that if there are certain categories you either love and want to never miss a post (in which case add the category to “Watched”) or don’t want to see at all (in which case add to “Muted” and I believe topics in that category would be hidden even from the homepage / latest topics list.) So yes infrastructurally I think it would be manageable. More a question of us figuring out how exactly we want to implement. Will chat some more w/ Troy about this and see what we can figure out.

[Drew]

That’s an interesting idea, @Brendan. That and/or a subforum that separated them from the main forum so you could browse them separately, maybe?

[Brendan]

Yeah I think having this as a separate category would do that pretty well! Would let you click into the category to browse just those topics separately. That plus the category preferences on a per-user level would make it pretty flexible.

(With this forum software categories = the main way to bucket content in a way that’s separately browsable; any permissions for example if we had a trust level requirement for a certain type of post would be at the category level as well. Subcategories and tags are also possible but prob not needed at the scale we’re at currently!)

[Brendan]

Hey @tommo @SylvSylv @JonJon @Drew @charface and anyone else following this discussion, I wanted to follow up and make sure you saw — we just added a new category for performance videos (and/or audio; basically any playing you want to share not meant for #technique-critique).

Thanks for the suggestions to help get this going! Here’s the new category:

https://forum.troygrady.com/c/show-and-tell

One note to address a question that came up above re: adjusting what you see on the forum — if you go to Preferences > Categories you’ll find a setting to specify default notification levels on a per-category basis.

For example if there’s a category you want to follow super closely and never miss a post, add it to Watched. Conversely, if there’s a category you have zero interest in and want to hide its posts by default, you can add it to Muted.

I moved some existing topics to this category that seemed to fit well as great examples of #show-and-tell . If you notice any others that seem to belong there let me know, and of course feel free to share new stuff there any time!

[Skye]

Yeah I would be completely on board with allowing people to just post any clips of playing they like. I really enjoy watching people do cover songs, and I would be fine with people being able to post things that are beyond just the technique critique type.

Honestly, it almost feels like this forum doesn’t want people to post their playing.

[Brendan]

For sure, that’s exactly why we made this new Show and Tell category. We definitely don’t want to discourage people from sharing their playing, in fact the opposite! But previously we hadn’t really designated a space outside of Technique Critique for things like original music, covers, and other performance type things.

Not sure if you saw this post with more detail; we can continue discussion here:

New category: Show and Tell - share your music and playing!

New category alert!! Based on some great feedback from users here, we’ve added a new section on the forum specifically for sharing awesome things you play. You can find it here: Show and Tell We already have #technique-critique for specific technical feedback. But we also wanted a space for posting progress updates, songs you wrote, and other sorts of playing. One part entertainment, one part education, one part supportive community for sharing your work. T…