The 3 best guitar forums on the internet
Most guitar forums on the internet are just plain awful. But there are three that are decent where you can actually discuss things on a civilized level.
To those who have never done the forum thing before
Larger forums have been around a long time and predate Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube. Heck, some are approaching the age where if the forum were a person, it would be almost old enough to drink.
As technology progresses on the internet, forums don't. The basic forum way of doing things was established in the late 1990s, and very little has changed. Older forums are the classic definition of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". There is a learning curve, and yes you can master it even if you've never used one before.
Are all guitar forums "related" to each other?
No, but many of the larger ones are. Two of the three below list themselves as "sister" sites to each other.
As you explore guitar forums across the internet, it is typical you will find these connections here and there. Totally normal.
It is also typical you will find forum regulars that bounce between forums, almost as if they're having one giant conversation across multiple sites.
The 3
These are the three where I've found the community to be actually helpful.
- TDPRI
(discussion about the Fender Telecaster) - Strat-Talk
(discussion about the Fender Stratocaster) - My Les Paul
(discussion about the Gibson Les Paul)
What is the best use of guitar forums?
Guitar technical information, guitar historical information and troubleshooting assistance.
With the three forums above, every single thing you could ever want to know about Stratocaster, Telecaster and Les Paul guitars is there. There is no stone unturned. There is no topic about those guitars that hasn't been discussed. Every model year, every pickup, every wood species ever used on production models, every little tidbit of info you ever wanted to know, all of it. It's there.
One could arguably say that if the guitar information you're looking for isn't contained within those three forums, it doesn't exist.
Why use old style forums when there's Facebook and Reddit?
The main reason is the ability to go back through 10+ years of archived discussions to find the information you're looking for.
A standard piece of advice anyone who uses forums regularly says is, "search first before you ask". So that's what you do. You sign up an account, start searching, and more often than not you'll find the info you were looking for.
Old posts can be found on Reddit and Facebook, but you'll run into broken threads often. With forums, the thread structure is kept over the years, and the only broken stuff will be images and linked external sites that no longer work. But the text is still all there, and that's what matters.
It is worth your time to get an account at one of these old forums, if for no other reason just to search old discussions for information purposes.
