About This Site
On This Page...
- Why another acoustic guitar site?
- Key resources
- Cue Bullets
There are a number of acoustic guitar sites
on the Internet; why add another?
The sites we know of fall into two categories: those that predominantly
contain links to information residing at the site ("information sites"),
and those that consist of collections of links to information
hosted at other sites ("jump sites"). This site
is a bit of a hybrid, but there are far more links to resources outside
this site than to resources here, so it is largely a jump site.
But where most other acoustic guitar jump sites simply list links (possibly
in a few categories), here we try to let you know what you'll find
before you jump.
To try to accomplish this, we...
- More extensively categorize links;
- Provide a bit of textual information
about each link; and
- Provide graphical cues to the type of information (web page, jump
site, text page, gopher site, etc.) at each link.
In a sense, then, this is an "information about information" site! But
we also host many bits of information ourselves. The main resources original
to this site are:
RMMGA
There is an amazing amount of information of potential interest to acoustic
guitarists on the Internet. But of course, there's quite a bit of
information not on the net as well!
If you can't find the information you are looking for here or at one of
the other web resources on our
Other Resource Collections page,
a good place to post a query
is the rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic Usenet newsgroup, affectionately known as RMMGA.
RMMGA is the place on the net to tap into
the collected wisdom of online players and get a personalized response.
It's also a generally cool place just to hang out!
Welcome to RMMGA!
PLEASE endeavor to follow the sensible, informal
rules of "netiquette" before posting to RMMGA. Here are some simple guidelines
that will help insure that your post gets read:
- Learn "Netiquette"
- If you are new to newsgroups, be sure to read a few of the documents
in the New Usenet News Users
Newsgroup. Some are archived on the web; links to many of
them are available at the news.announce.newusers FAQ list hosted
by Ohio State University.
- Read the FAQ
- A FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions document) includes answers to
many frequently asked questions. Regular newsgroup readers in particular
will appreciate it if you don't repeat a question that was
dealt with, not only last week, but every week before that, too!
The RMMGA FAQ is posted occassionally on RMMGA and
is also available online. Also, Ohio State University hosts a useful
archive of Usenet Newgroup FAQs.
- Check the Web
- Look around the Web for answers to questions that seem as if they
may be common. This set of web pages is probably as good a starting
point as any for acoustic guitar questions.
- Lurk Before You Post
- Read the postings that appear on the newsgroup for a few days or
a week, to get a sense of the dynamics of the group, but also to
catch pointers to existing resources that may address your questions.
- Use an Informative Subject
- Make your subject line brief but informative. If your subject
is "Guitar Question," it is likely that many will skip it. It is a
common practice in many groups to use a few capital letters (often
in brackets or followed by a colon) to
identify the nature of a post, such as:
- ANN: --- Announcements (concert itineraries, etc.)
- REQ: --- Requests (e.g. for specific tablature)
- Q: --- Query (most original posts probably fit this category!)
- FS: --- For Sale (non-commercial sales, usually of used gear)
- COMM: --- Commercial post (e.g. advertising a product or service for sale)
If your post is commercial in nature (you are selling a product or
service), you should make a special effort to indicate this. Initial
commercial announcements are fine, but regular repostings of
commercial announcements are likely to upset many readers.
- Keep Your Posts Brief
- There are many posts a day on RMMGA, and many RMMGA readers
read other newsgroups, too. Keeping your post brief will help make
sure it gets read; it will also reduce the storage requirements of
news servers. If you quote another post or email in your post (for
exampe, if you are responding to another post), refrain from routinely
quoting the entire post---mention only what is relevant. Also, keep
your .sig ("signature") short.
- Avoid Crossposting
- Crossposting is posting the same message to several different groups
at once. An unfortunate consequence of crossposting is that most replies
also get crossposted automatically, generating many more messages per
group than would otherwise exist. To keep traffic down, avoid crossposting
unless absolutely necessary. If your query is relevant to several
groups, consider posting it separately to those groups.
You'll have to read all of them to catch all the answers, but you'll
spare others the increased traffic.
- Respect Others' Opinions
- Most important of all, keep in mind that the posters and readers
in RMMGA are people, not automatons. They have opinions and
feelings. Avoid flames; if you must flame someone, do it privately,
by email! But consider first how you might feel as the recipient of
your message. We're all tied together in RMMGA by a mutual love of
six strings vibrating across a piece of wood; the posts
in RMMGA hopefully reflect the sense of community so often associated
with acoustic music.
Our thanks to Chifuru "Chief" Noda, an RMMGA regular, for suggestions
incorporated into these guidelines!
Guitar Notes by Jason Nieh
Although these pages were constructed as an alternative to less
informative acoustic guitar jump lists, we don't mean to knock such
lists in the least. If you know where you want to go, but
just need to locate the link, a one-page jump list may better
serve your needs than will this resource. The same may be true
if you'd like to spend lots of time browsing lots of resources, more-or-less
aimlessly. We list several guitar jump lists
in our Other Resource Collections page.
Our favorite is Guitar Notes by Jason Nieh; it's both
comprehensive and attractive, and it includes links to resources specific to
the electric guitar that don't appear here.
Make sure you check it out.
OLGA
Finally, if you're looking for one-stop shopping for guitar music,
software, and information, the single best location is
the On Line Guitar Archive, another
resource known affectionately by its acronymn, OLGA. It's an
anonymous FTP site, so you will probably have to look around a lot to find what
you want. Perhaps the nicest way to access it (especially for
net newbies) is through
Guitar Music Archive Search 
.
We use very small (roughly letter-sized) transparent GIF icons
at the end of an anchor (a "link") to provide a visual cue
of what to expect from the link before you visit it or
point to it.
Such icons have become
generally known as "cue bullets" or "QBullets," although the latter
term is actually a servicemark for a specific collection of cue bullets.
A brief legend appears below. A fuller legend, including information
about where I located these cue bullets, is at the web page,
A Selection Of Cue Bullet Icons.
Cue Bullet Legend
- Another web site
- A link down the current page
- A link up the current page
- Textual web page ???
- Plain text file
- Page of links (jump site)
- FTP directory
- Gopher site
- FAQ document
- Send email
- Usenet newsgroup
- News item
- Home Page
- Image
- Sound file
- A form
- Machine-specific file (software)
- Some specific cases:
- Unix XWindows file
- Apple Mac file
- IBM PC file for Windows
- IBM PC file (non-Windows)
- Machine-specific archive
[This line is just a dummy internal link for the above
anchors!]
Back to the opening page...
This resource is the work of Tom Loredo, who welcomes suggestions, comments, criticisms, and pats on the back
about this resource. Thanks for visiting!
Tom Loredo /
loredo@spacenet.tn.cornell.edu