The music threads are hard work.

It's true that the least friendly people on this site are those who do the "music only" thing here -- but it's probably not because they are unfriendly people, rather, they are here taking advantage of a different function of this site. Once answered, most music threads are done. Stick a fork in 'em...

...and that means, essentially, most music threads have died a-borning because I'll just betcha that a good 90% of all folk-related questions were answered in the first two years of this forum's life. Now all that is required to answer a question is a link to a previous thread.

Of course I'm exaggerating a bit, but I think that is the dynamic.

Music threads can be designed for more sharing, but in reality, that's a really tall order too. It's hard to communicate music without sound or without some ready-to-post means of communicating musical ideas (I used to get such a kick out of Rick Fielding's exceedingly patient descriptions - "take your index finger and put it on the third string, fourth fret and then....").

A couple of weeks ago I was kinda stumped on a really well-known swing chord progression -- one that has just all kinds of directions it could go. I figured that if I posted the first part of the progression here, I'd get a few guitarist's interested in putting their favorite endings to the progression.

In retrospect: 1. many of the guitarists who used to participate in threads like that are either dead or long gone. 2. It takes TIME to post chords, 3. I gave the thread a do-or-die title -- I tried to entice by mystery rather than being straight-forward. I guessed that others might be like me and see chords and curiosity would make them pull out their guitars to see what it was and then they'd know exactly what the thread was about. I was wrong. C'est La Vie.

But I've said it before and I'll say it again...

...on second thought, no I won't.