ShortScale.org

At least you can get halfway decent mags like Guitarist. Over here all the guitar mags are the size of phone directories and contain three one page articles. The rest is just ads. There's more actual content in the Musician's Friend catalog.

Has anybody noticed that magazines are getting smaller? I'd imagine that any magazine that you enjoy is bound to get worse. I put this down to the fact that when you started to buy every issue, it was more or less perfect, which is why you buy it over any of its rivals, but as changes happen (new editors, new layouts) it veers away from what you like, an so you assume that there is a drop in quality. I'd always put this down to being an assuned drop, that is a personal thing, and not something that can be quantified. I've experienced it several times, with Nintendo magazines when I was yonger, and later with Total Guitar and with Loaded.

However, I now suspect that ALL magazines are getting shitter. There are a few magazines that I have no loyalty too, and never felt any great affinity to. Guitarist is one such magazine. I bought it about three years ago (John Fruisciante on the cover following the release of his ep: curtains, a special feature about Jaguars and Jazzmasters, and a review of the THD Flexi-50) and thoroughly enjoyed it. I bought it about three months ago (Joe Bonnamassa on the cover, a feature on the Chet Atkins Gretsch, and a review of some Bognor amp) and it was decent, but certainly not as good. First off the magazine was much, much shorter. Where the old magazine took about three months of casual perusal to get through, the new one took about a week. Plus, I found the standard of journalism had dropped.

Another example is FHM. I used to buy this the odd time, and found it was usually a good bit better than Loaded, but I never bought it regularly. I found a few old copies from about five years ago in a charity shops for twenty pence each, and bought them. That was about a year ago, and I still haven't finished them. There are articles in those two magazines that I have read, but that I can't for the life of me find, such is the size of these magazines.

Thus ends (without any sort of conclusion) my small rant about magazines.

ok, I just browsed through that ish of guitarist in borders today. What a horrible review. It hardly tells you anything that you couldn't have just read off the specs on musicians friend and it was full of all kinds of cliche jag/jazzy bashing. all the usual sort of 'the strings fly right out of the saddles' nonsense. they managed to call them the "maligned duo" and the "disastrous duo" among other trite insults.

DGNR8 wrote:How do publications even stay in business now? I can't think of anything I would have time to read that I couldn't get online.

this currently popular idea that the internet is going to kill the print medium is not a very well thought out point. sure it will take a lot of the market share, because it is a competing medium, but it's not going to outright kill it. The truth is, TV didn't kill the radio star. radio is still here, and probably will be for a long time. it's just another format for spreading information. if the quality of radio programming went down hill it was it's own damn fault. People simply prefer different media fomats for different situations.

no internet publication can touch the leading newspapers as far as in depth, investigative reporting. Our democratic process relies on this to hold corporations and government institutions accountable for their actions. The internet is good at quick, hyper up to date reporting but it's still not so good at the in depth articles. The worst thing the print publications can do right now is to try to be more internet like. no one wants to read a newspaper blog. People want to read the newspaper for what the newspaper does well.

I like to browse through the musicians friend print catalog because you can quickly view an overview of all their inventory. that is not really possible with a web site. the internet is good at quickly retreiving the specific thing you are looking for but it's not very good at giving you a quick overview of everything.

oh and let me throw in a short response to BacchusPaul post.

as far as the print medium goes, magazines seem to be a pretty thriving field. the magazine section in borders or barnes and noble is effing huge. The more interesting/challenging magazines seem to be in genres of music, art, fashion and culture.

personally, I prefer newspapers (probably because they are often in the range of cheap to free). I'm a long time reader of the washington post, as it, along with the new york times, are really the only major papers worth your time in the US. and I am a fan of a lot of the free alternative weekly style papers you can find in big cities. The Honolulu Weekly was great when I lived there. When I lived in boston I enjoyed both the Boston Phoenix and The Weekly Dig. and here in seattle I make sure to pick up The Stranger and The Seattle Weekly every week.

The Stranger is brilliant, from all the articles I've read online. The only magazine I subscribe to is NME, which I seem to maintain a love-hate relationship with, as it's good for album reviews and news and such, but I dislike it's constant hype-mongering over certain bands, building them up as the next big thing and then becoming the butt of jokes a couple months later. See: The Others, The Horrors, The Paddingtons, The Twang, The Raconteurs, The Pigeon Detectives, Glasvegas etc. But it is pretty funny.

The NME is pure filth. It's as bad as pitchfork.

smash hits for kids with fringes.

I wish Ray Gun still existed.

I might look at this issue at gc when i go soon. The only magagzines I buy are barely considered 'magazines' and should be called bi monthly books, akin to "THe Rodders Journal."I do have a few rags under subscription, but they're still car mags, like Traditional Rod and Kulture, and kustoms illustrated.

I do love jazzies though, so ill look. The entire review is probably like "this guitar WONT DDDO METAL." <insert j masics's "out there">

if i can get my mac to access the scanner wirelessly, i'll try and scan this article in soon.

The idiots said that the rhythm circuit on the Jaguar HH was "just for show" as the switch is a kill switch.

It's continuous coil taps you fucking morons. Of course they do nothing when the kill switch is on, but they COIL TAP all the rest of the time.

What the fuck? These people have my dream job and they don't even do their research. Oh and don't get me started about them blathering on about the 24" scale being a negative aspect of the guitar. Short Scale guitars are amazing.

It made me so angry

i think people should write more letters to magazines complaining about lazy journalism. maybe then they'd buck up their ideas. or maybe not..

Mike wrote:The idiots said that the rhythm circuit on the Jaguar HH was "just for show" as the switch is a kill switch.

It's continuous coil taps you fucking morons. Of course they do nothing when the kill switch is on, but they COIL TAP all the rest of the time.

What the fuck? These people have my dream job and they don't even do their research. Oh and don't get me started about them blathering on about the 24" scale being a negative aspect of the guitar. Short Scale guitars are amazing.

It made me so angry

Is the article on their site, too? We should be bombarding them with complaints.

James wrote:

Mike wrote:The idiots said that the rhythm circuit on the Jaguar HH was "just for show" as the switch is a kill switch.

It's continuous coil taps you fucking morons. Of course they do nothing when the kill switch is on, but they COIL TAP all the rest of the time.

What the fuck? These people have my dream job and they don't even do their research. Oh and don't get me started about them blathering on about the 24" scale being a negative aspect of the guitar. Short Scale guitars are amazing.

It made me so angry

Is the article on their site, too? We should be bombarding them with complaints.

They upload it to musicradar.com after a bit I think. IDIOTS.

I hated the fact they were dissing teh short scale. That's what a Jaguar is FOR.

I've just looked an dit's not up yet

hahah search box same colour as backgruond boys? wank design.

We should tell them what we think.

It would be remiss of them not to listen to what we have to say, we must be in the top ten guitar forums on the internet.

WE ARE the trendsetters, and the market.

Obviously to almost everyone here this is #1, but I wonder where we actually rank in terms of the general opinion. I'm not a fan of any but Harmony central, The Gear Page and the FDP are the three biggest I can think of in terms of sheer traffic. There are probably a lot of forums I'm not even aware of that are quite big.

Bought it this morning: what a bunch of fucking doofuses, whose research clearly only runs to youtube and two books. So ill informed, plus well designed as strats are, are they really the yardstick by which all guitars should be judged? Especially the fucking trem. Jesus. I think Guitarist wanted to add a laughter track to the article, and one of those WACK-WACK-WAAAAAA!!! unfortunate sound effects.

It was really wank wasn't it?

See the thing is, everytime I see a feature on a Jaguar or Jazzmaster in a guitar magazine, I just think about how I don't care because of knowledge garnered from places like this and jag-stang back in the day. Pretty pictures are what I'm into.

The new Jags sound like a fucking travesty the more I hear about 'em. I wonder if anyone with a backwards and/or sideways baseball cap rocking the infamous skater shorts & wallet chain combo has one.

Just read some more: oh my crikey - they save special praise for the fact it finally has a screw in trem, rather than that oh-so-tricky push in one. And is it really all about sustain? Possibly the worst jazzmaster write-up ever.