Welcome!

Welcome to StringCommunity.com, a social website being developed by Shar Music for the benefit of the string music community. A question I imagine many people will have upon visiting is ‘why do we need another social site in this community when we already have great, well developed communities?’  I’ll answer that — there are several reasons:

First, Shar has maintained a number of blogs over the past few years, ranging from a blog about creating a violin for the first time to a blog featuring personal stories and recommendations about favorite repertoire by the Apprentices.  We wanted a platform for these blogs that will enable interaction with readers.  We like telling everyone about what we’re doing, but we’d love it even more if we could have a conversation.  Beyond just that, with this new website absolutely anyone can create and maintain a blog.  As a result we’re not only going to have a great deal of new staff blogs, but we hope that visitors start using this feature as well!

Second, every year Shar runs a number of contests, with the winners featured in our catalogs.  The Photo contest is certainly the most popular, but we also run essay contests and others.  Stringcommunity.com will serve as a host to these contests.  Now, instead of simply sending in submissions for judges to look at, participants and visitors will be able to view all other submissions and vote on the winner as well!

Third, Shar would like to build this website into a resource for visitors.  We’d like people to be able to come here to find an answer to any question or curiosity they might have.  We’ll be filling the video and article sections of this website with helpful content, and we’ll be trolling the discussion boards alert for questions.  Beyond this (and arguably more importantly) we hope that visitors will contribute to the content here as well.  When we’re finished with this site it should offer an easy to use platform for absolutely anyone to share their knowledge and expertise through any media.

Lastly, as the name suggests, Shar is designing this website as a social community.  It’ll have the important features that you’d find on any major social network (such as facebook or ning), tailored specifically for string musicians.  For example, if you’re a teacher, all you have to do is select that in your profile and you’ll be featured in our search-able teacher database.  Staff here will be doing what we can to cultivate this community as well.

There is one other important thing to mention.  This website is still very much unfinished.  Shar needed a platform for the Teacher Apprentice Contest, though, so we launched this site publicly to host that contest while the rest of the site was still under development.  We expect the site to be finished in the next month or two, and until then there will be more and more to do here.  Feel free to jump into things right now, however.   We certainly will be ourselves, so expect to constantly see new content and events here.

Thanks for visiting!