Heya Flashbanders,
We have grown immensely over the past year, which is evident to many of you who have been involved. Those of you on the fringes might want to live vicariously through the everyone else, but really don't have the outlet. We don't call. We don't write. If it weren't for the email announcements of upcoming events, you probably wouldn't even think to look at the site. I'm here to change that. Starting tonight we are going to be producing content and hopefully soliciting content from people like you.
Did you write about Flashband or your experiences? Let us know. We will include you in the blog. Is there something you'd like to hear about? Shoot us an email and let us know. Has this blog post been on the front page for three months? If you tell us about it and can convince us to write a new one, I'll take you out to dinner. (Yes this is a promise. No, you don't get to choose the restaurant. No it won't be fast food. Yes it only applies to the first person who reminds us that we need to update this thing. Yes I'll make exceptions for cute girls as long as you email me and don't tell Amanda).
Two examples I can think of. One, Anna Robinson, a Flashband Alumnus who sadly recently left the DC area, wrote a blog post about her experience playing one of our amazing Club Heaven events.
Second is a long post on the guitar forum of reddit from Flashbander Will Ward, who put together a great blog post about learning to play mandolin as a guitar player. If you've done something like this that we aren't aware of, send it along. We'll be sure to publish it!
We hope to be writing about a lot of different things. Flashband is moving is a lot of new and interesting directions, from adding classes and listening parties, to partnerships with local music businesses and organizations. We hope to keep you up to date on all of those things. This past year we've incorporated and are an official company in the state of Virginia. We've also dropped our definite article and the word Project from our name, choosing to go just with Flashband. I hope to have Neal write about all of the interesting (or not so interesting) legal and business discussions we had going into this. Meanwhile, Amanda and I have been grinding away on the technical side of things, working with new and interesting web technologies to give you guys a hopefully-better-than-average site experience. I'm sure some of you Flashbanders are also tech people, so at some point I'll be writing about our tech stack and how a 3 person team can run a little social network. I'm also assuming Amanda will write a blog post that consists solely of pictures of kittens. I might convince her to also talk about search engine optimization and how a bunch of pictures of kittens and a title like "Ten reasosn why Kittens and Puppies are the Best Thing ever for Musicians. You won't believe what happens next!" can help us reach a larger audience of musicians for you to play with.
Mostly, we want to hear from you. What do you want us to talk about? We want to provide you with content that is useful and interesting to you as a musician. Feel free to comment, and if we use your idea, I'll get you a prize. It won't be dinner as mentioned above, but it will be cool. Also, if you see myself, Neal, or Amanda around, instead of saying hi, you should say, "HEY, Write a blog post about ______ so I can win a prize!"
Love and Happy 2014 from Caleb of Flashband, with more writings to come.
