symres.org v2.0
Stefan Franke
Dear SR users,
it is my great please to welcome you to this new mailing list, and
announce the website's latest features!
I can only afford to spend so much time working on SR, and it took
a bit longer to enable the lists. So thank you for your patience.
Today I learned that Google limits the number of people you can
add to any group per day, so the SymRes
Forum list is yet to come.
Please refrain from replying to announcements in this list, in
order to keep it low volume (that's what the forum is for).
Aliases
Before we get to the new features, there's a small but important change regarding your user profile. Profiles used to have a "Nickname" field which I originally intended to use for an on-site forum. As this is not going to happen any time soon, I repurposed that field - retaining the actual nickname - and turned it into an "Alias". If you fill in that field, the alias will appear instead of your real name throughout the website - as a piece author or in group's member or pieces lists.
If you have set a nickname before, consider updating it. Read the section about User Profiles and Privacy to learn more.
Groups
Groups
have been in the making for a while. They are a tool to create
little communities of interest around a shared set of pieces.
Technically, a group is a set of pieces and set of users, one of
them the group owner.
The biggest change now is that everyone can create groups, and
(optionally) have them appear in the public groups
list, so other users may request membership. Group owners
can specify their own terms
and conditions of membership, and there's some basic support
for documenting member's acceptance of the terms.
I've clarified extended SR's Terms regarding commercial use, explicitly supporting people who want to use the website as part of their mbira teaching business.
Media Links
Hyperlinks within a piece's metadata are now shown underneath the respective fields in clickable form. Links to Youtube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud videos/tracks appear as embedded players on the page.
Coming next: Mbira dzaVaNdau beginner's course
I'm currently working with Solomon Madhinga from Chipinge on a little 5-pieces beginner's course for the mbira dzaVaNdau (which actually motivated many of the new features). It will be freely accessible, with a request for donations.
It is also an attempt do develop models & practices for
funding local cultural preservation activities by creating an
international community of interest. In our case, we hope to sell
more of Madhinga's mbiras and get donations for their local
cultural center by providing high-quality learning materials.
Since our Whatsapp communication is only sporadic, finishing the
course takes longer than expected. I'm announcing it today,
because if you already know that you're interested, it's a good
time for ordering an instrument: ZimPost international shipping is
operating again, and seems as cheap and reliable as it used to be,
according to a few recent accounts from Germany and US. And who
knows what's coming next in pandemic times...
For me as somehow who's mostly playing the nhare - like, I guess, most of us - getting started with the Ndau mbira has been a fascinating and rewarding experience. I can only recommend it! It feels much closer to drumming. Most songs are harmonically simpler than the Shona mbira, but much more varied and cunning on the rhythmic side. While the right hand most often plays a repetitive ostinato, the left hand improvized in three octaves, which is very good training for someone like me who's improvizing mainly with the right hand.
If this sounds interesting to you, please get in touch!
That's all for now. Stay safe and & healthy, and have a beautiful weekend!
Stefan