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Nick Drake’s stuff is awesome. My guitar teacher has started a series teaching Nick Drake songs. Can’t post the link here though. Search for Jon Yerby on YT

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Yes, I’m having issues and my eyes are not that bad. The yellow-on-white color scheme, with small, grey font is not friendly to aging eyes.

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I agree @Ron N. I’m finding I have to wade through tons of messages to get to the messages I’m interested in. With the site pages loading very slowly (like 1990s DSL speeds), it’s mildly irritating.

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+1 on this. The ability to “hack” the lessons was a feature of the old site that makes the TAC method tenable and sustainable for those of us who have been through the cycle of lessons several times. Not sure how man folks have tried the speed adjustment for the video, but it’s not good. It warps and distorts the tone of the guitar, which kind of defeats the purpose of the feature. I suspect as more people experience this, more folks will want the ability to download the lesson and use their own tools for slowing down/speeding up playback, as many of us do now.

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Congrats on your newest guitar! I love Furch guitars, and honestly think the Yellow series is a better value than the Red (the difference to my ear is marginal).

This guitar in not exception. What’s surprising is the fullness of the mid-range. The punchy, muscular the mid-range certainly helps the guitar’s projection and presence–this guitar sings with authority! The dynamic range is impressive. The difference between the gentle, intimate finger style playing and the loud, punchy, in-your-face strumming is huge! This guitar can do it all, and do it well.

I think you know this is a keeper. I love this guitar. Congrats again on an amazing addition to your guitarsenal.

You seem to have a knack for finding impressive guitars. I’m curious, did you get a chance to play the Furch before purchasing it?

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Loved this comment @Kristin1! Big BJ Fogg fan here…

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100% agree, @Loraine . I’m hoping the good folks running TAC are open to hearing that something significant has been jettisoned in the transition to this new forum philosophy. A big aspect of what differentiates TAC from other guitar learning sites is the community building that happened in the old forum.

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This literally breaks my heart.

I work at Microsoft. For most of the company’s existence, Microsoft tried to dictate to customers how customers should use its products. Creating features that nobody wanted (remember Clippy?), forcing partners to do our way or take the highway. After all, nobody’s gonna want a smart phone, right? We all know how well that worked out for Microsoft.

Microsoft learned the fundamental lesson of the marketplace the hard way: the customer will tell what they want from your product, if you listen. For the past seven years, customer centricity, always listening for and soliciting the voice of the customer, has been at the heart of what Microsoft does. Everything revolves around what the customer wants and uncovering how consumers actually use our products at Microsoft. The results don’t lie: the company went from being a tech afterthought in the 2000s to now being the second most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of $1.75 trillion (yes, trillion).

So far, certain aspects of the transition to the new site feels very “old Microsoft” to me. Any one else having flashbacks to the Windows 8 rollout? 😂 No? Just me?

It feels like the good folks at TAC heard a few things from us (“simplicity”, “more intuitive navigation”) and went immediately into solution mode. It seems they took the telemetry data on site usage at face value, without fully fleshing out the context of customer behavior (the “why” behind the data and the “how” TAC’s lessons are used in the real world, outside of how they were intended to be used).

For example, Levi replied on a different thread that only a tiny percentage of folks bothered to download the video for each day’s lesson. Meanwhile, the folks at TAC were often fielding lots technical support questions related to downloading the lessons. So it seems logical to disable downloads, and get rid of a constant source of technical questions. But I wonder if the real reason for the low download numbers was a tautological one: once the lesson was downloaded, there was no need to download it again. For me (and others), I have been through the lesson cycle several times, and downloaded all of the lessons, I almost always work on the lessons offline, logging on only to check the “complete” box. There’s no way the telemetry data could capture this insight. Now, this way of doing the TAC lessons can’t be done in the new site. The new site forces you to use TAC in a prescribed way. Very “old Microsoft”, right?

A critical step in the management of this site change was missed: the customers (us) weren’t brought along with the change in a meaningful, collaborative way. The change wasn’t co-created with us. Transitioning the philosophy of the forums to a narrower set of topics would feel more natural had the topics been part of the previous forum site, and folks got a chance to test out how the new forum philosophy would work, within the context of the old forums.

In my (extensive, 20+ years) experience managing people change efforts in both business and recreational contexts (often involving tens of thousands of people), the most vital piece of advice is this: you can’t dictate how folks are supposed to interact with your product or organization. When change happens a third of folks will just go with the flow, a third will try to recreate what they had before within the new context, and a third will vote with their feet. And when those who try to recreate what they had before get frustrated that they can’t, a good portion of them will vote with their feet.

It’s early days in the site transition. To be fair, there’s a lot the folks at TAC got right. But there are three, glaring missteps in managing the “people” part of the change that could undermine the whole thing. That we weren’t brought along with the forum philosophy change is one of them. It has the potential to undermine the transition, and turn the forums into a glorified “show and tell” space, losing most of what gave the TAC forums its vibrancy, spontaneity and sense of community connection. The new forum philosophy feels like we only get to talk about “work” (performances, sharing your “TAC routine”) and less about “play” (sharing new music, geeking out on gear).

I have to ask, does anybody else think it’s odd to have a forum topic to talk about your “TAC routine” when so much of the flexibility in hacking your TAC routine that existed in the old site no longer exists in the new site?

I sure hope my experience of what derails changes like this does not come to pass. The point of change management is to make the change feel like a natural evolution of things, and less like ripping the band-aid off. Ripping the band-aid breaks trust. No amount of cheerleading and pleas of “just give us a chance” can fix that.

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That worked! Thanks for the reminder to clear the Cache, Lance.