TromboneChat

I'm missing a few boards that we had in TTF, and I'm unsure where else I should post topics in the existing board structure.

The main one is "Performance". I'm thinking about topics such as
- Should Brahms symphonies be played on an alto or tenor
- Does it make sense to substitute the tuba in a brass quintet with a bass trombone
- How fast would you play piece XYZ
- How do you play the Bartok glissando on a single trigger bass
- etc.
(No, I don't want everybody to start discussing these questions now; we're meta here.)

These would all fit in "Performance" in TTF, and I can't find any place for these in the new forum.

The other one is "Practice Room". I guess we could use "Teaching & Learning" for most of the topics there, but I would have thought that "Teaching & Learning" is more for pedagogy questions, or for discussing the different schools such as Reinhard, Caruso, etc., whereas I think of "Practice Room" to be more about the concrete things we practice on, e.g. "How do I work on my double tonge?". So I'm wondering whether "Teaching & Learning" should be split into two, somehow.

Any thoughts?

I think originally we did have a 'performance' forum but when we copied everything over, it didn't make it. For the time being, put them in Music Business. We wanted the board to be very simple to navigate (and the primary complaint last month was that everything was much too convoluted with subforums etc.). I think we might rename it to Music Business & Performance but it's possible we could make separate categories for them. In which case, it would be easy to move anything that wasn't related out.

I'll wait for some other folks to chime in - just know that the original philosophy of TromboneChat was to expand on what TTF was doing and make it more granular. With our revamp, we went in the opposite direction to make things simpler and more streamlined. So I'm sure if we really want to add another thing unless there's some real demand for it. We had "forum sprawl" for a while and I don't want to revisit that again.

Thoughts, everyone?

I totally agree that a structure that is too fine-grained should be avoided. In this particular case though, I feel that there's just no place in the current structure to discuss topics related to how to perform brass music, which for me is one of the most important topics to talk about. And "Music Business" is totally unrelated to that, so even renaming that to "Music Business & Performance" doesn't seem right to me.

Any other opinions?

Yes, I have been a community manager for a couple of sites, and there is a time to break out a finer structure, but that's when a topic starts to overwhelm the general discussion. Like classifieds. They would overwhelm other topics. You need a critical mass to keep things going.

If you use keywords or tags for search, then headings are less important, but its difficult to get people to use tags evenly.

Tubenet gets away with just one category for the bulk of the discussion, but the discussion over there is probably 30% snark.

Performance forum is now open!

Thanks!