The IGS Guitar Forum

The seminars ran for a week a year. The forum ran continuously, and in the end it outlived them. The forum's purpose and significance are described below; the private board posts remain unavailable.

What it was

The Guitar Forum began as a small message board attached to the seminar and grew into its largest online gathering by a very wide margin — thousands of threads across two main sections, one on guitar and one for everything else the community wanted to talk about. It ran first on UBB software and later on a phpBB installation.

Its purpose was straightforward and the organisers said so in their own brochure copy: "Student jam sessions are popping up more and more often at our Guitar Forum and reports of both staff and student reunions are coming in from all corners of the world." A residential week produces a community with no natural way to keep talking. The board was that way.

What was on it

Broadly: tunings and technique questions; arguments about recordings and transcriptions; people arranging to meet at the next session; instrument talk; the perennial gear questions about slides, action height and string gauges; and a large volume of ordinary conversation between people who had spent a week together and wanted to keep in touch. Faculty posted. Alumni organised regional meet-ups. Newcomers asked the questions the FAQ had already answered, and were answered again patiently.

Privacy and the inactive board

Two reasons, and both are deliberate.

The posts were written by private individuals for a small community. Publishing thousands of personal messages now would repurpose them without the writers' agreement.

Second, the board's value was never in any individual thread. It was in the fact that the conversation continued between sessions.

Where that conversation went

Communities of this kind did not disappear when individual boards did; they consolidated. The long-running Mudcat Café still hosts the same sort of discussion — source arguments, tune provenance, transcription disputes and regional meet-ups — for the folk and blues world generally. Anyone who used the IGS board will recognise the format immediately.

More about the seminar

For what the board was talking about, see the repertoire and tunings pages. For the week that produced the community in the first place, see the programme and the letters alumni sent afterwards. The organisers' own account of the community's growth is in the history page.