Questions: Online Lutherie Info

by R.M. Mottola

Originally published in American Lutherie #68, 2001

See also,
Questions: Online Lutherie Chat by Cyndy Burton

R.M. Mottola of Newtonville, MA responds to the question in AL#67 regarding where to have your lutherie questions answered online:

I’m sure you’ll get lots of responses that give specific URLs, but here is some background and a way to find most places where you can ask your questions. The internet is generally considered to have three basic facilities — e-mail, websites, and Usenet newsgroups. There are discussion groups on the topic of instrument making that use each of these facilities. To find those implemented as websites you can use any internet search engine to search for appropriate terms. Typing “guitar discussion” into a search engine will get you a lot of hits. Finding discussion groups implemented as e-mail mailing lists could be tricky, as there are no comprehensive search facilities for such mailing lists. Fortunately most if not all e-mail-based discussion groups have a website too, so the search specified above will find those as well.

Although most folks are not familiar with Usenet, it contains probably the single largest collection of topic-specific discussion groups. Rec.music.makers.builders is the grand daddy of all instrument building discussion groups, and is a Usenet newsgroup. You can access newsgroups using special facilities included in any web browser. Or you can go to one of the Usenet specific search engines such as Deja News (http://dejanews.com) and follow instructions there for posting to and reading selected newsgroups. ◆