All righty, then.
The WF staff has been talking a little bit about this. While our membership is overwhelmingly from the professional set and we want to cater to them, we also don't want beginners to feel too outta place. However, we also don't want to see or answer 500 questions about, "What's the best instrument for a beginner?"
So, the idea, that was initially mentioned by $CE (that person can come forward to take the praise/blame) and expanded on by me, is to try to have a FAQ for beginners, so if a common question is asked, someone can say, "Check out the FAQ thread at <link>" and I can close the thread.
Now, I can easily cover saxophone and clarinet. I really don't feel comfortable enough making recommendations for equipment for flute, say, or turkey feathers for oboes (they still use those to clean 'em, right?), but I do think I can make some good general comments about, "Choose a good teacher, get a decent instrument, etc."
I'm going to make it into an entire forum area over the next few weeks, but I already had started some writing on my neglected Wiki awhile back at http://www.thesax.info/mediawiki-1.10.0/index.php?title=Info:for_beginners
Please tell me if there's a topic that's missed that you'd like to see/should be covered. We can talk content when I get the area up.
The WF staff has been talking a little bit about this. While our membership is overwhelmingly from the professional set and we want to cater to them, we also don't want beginners to feel too outta place. However, we also don't want to see or answer 500 questions about, "What's the best instrument for a beginner?"
So, the idea, that was initially mentioned by $CE (that person can come forward to take the praise/blame) and expanded on by me, is to try to have a FAQ for beginners, so if a common question is asked, someone can say, "Check out the FAQ thread at <link>" and I can close the thread.
Now, I can easily cover saxophone and clarinet. I really don't feel comfortable enough making recommendations for equipment for flute, say, or turkey feathers for oboes (they still use those to clean 'em, right?), but I do think I can make some good general comments about, "Choose a good teacher, get a decent instrument, etc."
I'm going to make it into an entire forum area over the next few weeks, but I already had started some writing on my neglected Wiki awhile back at http://www.thesax.info/mediawiki-1.10.0/index.php?title=Info:for_beginners
Please tell me if there's a topic that's missed that you'd like to see/should be covered. We can talk content when I get the area up.