The International Songwriting Competition (ISC) deadline for the 2009 competition has been extended until Nov 30. Now is your chance to enter what the NY Times calls “the competition to take note of” with $150,000 (US) in cash and prizes – including $25,000 (US) cash for the grand prize winner alone and the best judges for any songwriting competition in the world. Judges for 2009 include: Kings Of Leon, Tom Waits, Rob Thomas, Jeff Beck, Black Francis (Pixies), Robbie Williams and 6 record label presidents from major and independent records labels. For entry information and a complete list of judges please visit our website – Songwriting Competition

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Welcome to our June Guitar Giveaway – this month we’d like to thank the kind folks over at Barking Dog Guitar Traders for providing us with this Eastwood Guitar classic. The design comes from a non-reverse Firebird yet has a flavor all it’s own. The Stormbird in white, was recently discontinued so some lucky Gearhead will be winning an instantly and potentially collectible classic.

Please feel free to visit with Barking Dog Guitar Traders at their Gbase Dealer page or at the website – Barking Dog Guitar Traders

Contest is now closed, winner to be announced shortly.

Planet Waves’ Chordmaster puts a comprehensive library of more than 7,800 guitar chords in the palm of your hand. Featuring a unique virtual fretboard that accurately displays notes and fingerings, Chordmaster allows users to view chords in multiple neck positions and strum virtual strings to hear each chord in pristine digital audio. Chords are organized by Root, Chord Type and Chord Variants to allow fast, easy navigation. Chordmaster even offers a “lefty” mode for the oft-ignored left-handed guitarist. Players at any level can explore and expand their chord vocabulary with this innovative, simple-to-use hand-held music tool.

Scale Wizard is a complete guitar scale and arpeggio library brought to you by Planet Waves, one of the D’Addario company’s family of world-renowned musical instrument accessory brands.

Scale Wizard puts a massive library of guitar scales, modes and arpeggios into the palm of your hand. This revolutionary app will help you unlock the secret of guitar scales, modes and arpeggios in any key, for any position on the guitar.

Offering over 10,000 patterns, left-handed view and alternate tunings, Scale Wizard is the most complete scale application on any platform. With an interface truly optimized for iPhone and iPod touch, you can swipe your finger up and down the fretboard to hear ascending and descending scales or tap the screen to hear individual notes. You’ll hear the scales, modes and arpeggios come to life, played by a skilled professional guitarist. Multiple positions of each scale, mode and arpeggio exist, to ensure that you’ll always find a unique way to apply your new-found knowledge.

Gbase hits the road this spring, with stops in some new exciting new territories for our staff. Our efforts this year will be introducing Gbase to brand new sets of eyes as well as meeting up with some new dealers. We’re currently speaking with numerous Drum and Percussion dealers in an effort to introduce Gbase to a new marketplace…..Drummers!

Okay, okay, enough with the drummer jokes, but yes, we’re speaking to many of the key drum dealers from across the globe as a way to expand the Gbase audience. Here’s where you’ll find us in the coming few months. If you’re in the neighborhood, please stop in and say “hey”:

Chicago Drum Show -  May 16th & 17th -Kane County Fairgrounds, St. Charles, IL

The London International Music Show - June 11th thru 14th – Excel, London, England

Grey Fox Music Festival - July 16th thru 19th – Walsh Farm, Oak Hill, NY

As you already know, we have re-launched our updated site and have been diligently working through a few bugs but we’re certainly well on our way. One key element that we most certainly overlooked was a clear and clean method to alert users, dealers and the like to the many updates, improvements and added value on the new site. This blog is designed to assist us in this process going forward.

Lastly, much thanks goes to many of the dealers who provided us with feedback during the initial survey phase as well as the recent testing phase, helping us debug and add much of the value that you will find here. – Don

Gbase HOMEPAGE

Our new homepage has been completely redesigned. The key components of this redesign are:

Gearhead Gazette – Top Right-hand corner- Always online – links directly to this blog where we now house the Gearhead Gazette – contains contests, articles, the Tips and Tone column, Gbase dealer interviews and news for members to enjoy.

Advertising – Our new ad model is coming together. This has been a tough process so we’ll spare you the details. We’ve increased the size of our main ad banner. You’ll note it’s bigger than the Gbase logo. Our intent is to give our advertisers prominence on the site. We’ve done our best to keep the costs down, while we work on building more traffic. The button to the top right is for manufacturers and MI-related partners only. The Ad Buttons (currently 3 positions located below “Featured Gear”) are slightly larger than the buttons from the previous homepage. The key value in all these ad placement positions will be KEYWORDS. In the not-too-distant future, you will be able to purchase keywords related to your ad.

For instance – if you own lots of Rickenbacker Guitars, you can obtain the keyword “Rickenbacker” for twenty-five cents (more or less). And then anytime someone searches for “Rickenbacker,” your ad will appear on the search return page. Another way to look at this is, if you own a ton of Hi-Watt amps, you may want to obtain “Marshall,” so that when someone searches for a Marshall Amp, your ad pops up. This will work for both Banner ads and Button ads.

Featured Gear – This is a new section designed to allow “Elite” dealers to tag pieces of gear for positioning on the homepage. Thumbnails have been added to this section as well as many areas of the homepage. This will greatly assist us with Search Engine placement and SEO (search engine optimization).

Dealer Spotlight – This replaces our “Dealer of the Day/Week” section from the previous homepage. It works for all levels of subscriptions. Most importantly, it is designed to give all of our Dealers, homepage “face” time. Make sure your store information is up-to-date and accurate, as this is now an important business card for your store. Selection for the spotlight is completely at random and done so for 10 minute intervals. So every 10 minutes, a new dealer will be placed in this location for everyone to view.

Most Wanted – This section was designed for 2 reasons – one it will be constantly changing and being updated at random. This helps with our SEO, like you wouldn’t believe. Secondly, it’s driven by consumer traffic. Consumers come to the site searching for gear, click on various pieces of gear and then based on the instruments that get the most clicks, end up in the “Most Wanted” bucket.

IMPORTANT NOTE -  Please know that any “gaming” of this section, placement of inappropriate images, headers, ad cards, ad rates or any other image that doesn’t stay in line with how and why this section was intended and designed, will be automatically deleted from this section and future listings will be blocked from future rotation in this section.

Newest Gear – This section was also designed for two reasons – much like “Most Wanted” – it’s constantly changing, constantly being updated. That affects our SEO. This will improve everyone’s rankings with the major search engines. And two, just like the previous homepage, it allows visitors to see the latest inventory that is being uploaded onto the site. The big improvement here are the thumbnails. Now consumers can see your gear, right up front.

IMPORTANT NOTE – Our previous comments about “gaming” this section apply here as well.

Newest Dealers – this is identical to the previous feature. As new dealers sign-up, they will be listed in this section (left-hand column) for a period of 30 days. (this should be active any day now)

NEXT SECTION – FIND GEAR

Find Gear – This page has two tiers; at the top, you’ll find our refined search engine. It allows visitors to search for items in a very specific way. At the bottom of the page are “Clouds.” These “Clouds” or aggregated lists are weighted by font size as the top 50 most searched terms on our site. Consumers can use them, much as they used the “Fast Finds” on our previous homepage. The big advantage here is that these lists change, whereas the previous version was static. This will again assist us in our SEO. “Clouds” are also available from the homepage by clicking on the “TOP 50’s” link in the “FIND YOUR GEAR” section at the top of the page. Ads will be placed within the gear search return pages.

NEXT SECTION – FIND DEALER

Find Dealer – This hasn’t changed all that much – it allows for refined dealer searches.

Gear Radar – this is a function designed for Gearheads. It allows them to post pieces of gear that they are having trouble locating. When a Gearhead posts something in this section, dealers are notified thru their Dealer Dashboard. This will allow you some time to see if you have what they are looking for, in your store, rather than posted on Gbase. You can then, contact the Gearhead directly or you can then post the gear on Gbase and the Gearhead will automatically be notified that you uploaded what he/she was looking for.

NEXT PAGE – EVENTS

Events – In cooperation with Dr. Ducks of Ducksdeluxe.com, we’ve loaded the guitar and events page from his site. It’s a very complete listing of everything from guitar shows, bluegrass events, swap meets, etc. If you are having an event and it’s not listed, please email us at info@gbase.com. Be sure to include the name of the event, the location (city and state), contact info, a web address if it’s available and we’ll get it posted pronto.

NEXT PAGE- DEALER DASHBOARD (dealers only)

This is when you log into your Dealer account

LANDING PAGE – There are 5 blue buttons located just under the Gbase header. “DASHBOARD” – “MANAGE GEAR” – “MANAGE STORE” – “ADD NEW GEAR” – “PREVIEW STORE”. Most of these are pretty self-explanatory but we’ll list the updates so you can be sure you didn’t miss anything.

Dashboard – This lists your store, email contact, anniversary date of joining Gbase plus your store statistics. It also contains your subscription information, billing history and billing information. MOST IMPORTANT – this is also where you’ll find the site search report. It will provide you with an on-going Top-10 list of searches, Top-10 list of Keywords and Top-10 Makes and Models sought by and created by visitors on Gbase. Review this report along with the listings in “Most Wanted” and you’ll have a good idea of exactly what consumers are searching for on Gbase.

Manage Gear – This is where you can manage you gear. You can enter Gear Guides. Note that Gear Guides can be an important benefit to certain pieces of gear. If you want to guarantee that a special piece shows up in the Number One position, when a consumer searches for it, click on Gear Guides, chose the words that best fit your piece of gear (based on how a Gbase visitor would search for that piece of gear) and bid on those words. If you are uploading a 1963 Fender Jazz Bass, obtain Fender Jazz Bass for twenty-five cents or less and you will be sure that your listing will be number one. Unless someone out bids you and if they do, you will get the second highest bid unless you decide to go back in and out bid them. You can also mark your gear as SOLD, which is very important as this is one single most frequent complaint we receive from Gbase visitors – “dealers don’t remove gear after they’ve been sold or they don’t mark sold gear as “SOLD.” You can also upload, delete or change photos from this tab.

Manage Store – This is where you create your store information. This is what will appear in the Dealer Spotlight when your store lands on the homepage, so make sure it’s accurate, concise and effective. You can list your store directions. If you have a sale or special deal forthcoming, there’s a new “Announcement” section where you can feature something of this nature. Be sure to list your store policies, shipping, return policies and the like.

Add New Gear – This one is obvious. This is where you upload your new gear – define it, upload photos and it drops into your inventory. Pretty straight forward. There is a new part of this section – OFFSITE LINKS – this allows you to link this specific piece of inventory to a youtube video, the manufacturers site which has greater detail, pictures from your site, basically anything additional link that’s not on Gbase that would add value to the visitors experience and inducing him to purchase this piece of gear from you.

Preview Store – this allows you to verify that all the information you just entered is accurate. Make sure you double check this as it is what the consumers are going to see on the site when they visit your store.

CLOSING STATEMENT

This new re-launch has been a long time coming. There have been many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak and we have many people to thank for their efforts.  If you have comments or concerns regarding any portion of the site, please send your comments directly to me at don@gbase.com or more generically thruGbase to -  info@gbase.com. Either way, we’ll do our best to answer you as promptly as possible and address each and every concern accordingly.

Good luck gear hunting and we’ll catch up with you on the road somewhere soon!!

Don Dawson