Harmony Central

If you landed here, it is because a link to a page on the website formerly known as Harmony Central no longer exists.

Harmony Central used to be a very useful resource - good database of user reviews for musical devices of all kinds, excellent discussion forums, and education tools for the developing musician.  Unfortunately it was acquired by the music retail business Musicians Friend, who gave the website a complete makeover for the worse.  HC was transformed into a catalog as an extension of the Musician Friend retail business.  There is a reason why I used the expression "formerly known as Harmony Central".
 
The web design became user hostile.  The user reviews became a shambles, with web navigation tailored towards user reviews of new products (to promote sales).  If you wanted to find user reviews of out of production music gear, you had to dig deeper.  With the web hostile interface, using the BACK button took you to the top level so you had to navigate through the system every time.  Many of the reviews I wrote in that database are now missing.  Of the ones that remain, they are so deeply embedded that they no longer appear in search engine queries such as Google.  In the early days of eBay, I hated seeing unscrupulous sellings pitching a Moog Satellite with "that fat minimoog filter" which was a total lie - so I wrote a review that revealed that the Satellite does not have a minimoog filter and does not sound fat, and that review would appear near the top of a search query which effectively stopped the deceptive ebay sellers.  I did that for other products as well, but when the user review database went through its radical makeover those reviews no longer appeared in search engine queries.

The names of the reviewers for the gear reviews were also removed.  That really irked me because user names established legitimacy - there were a lot of bogus user reviews from people who had no clue how to operate the gear and I didn't want to wade through those reviews.

When Musicians Friend announced that they were claiming copyright of the contents of the user reviews, I ceased contributing to that database because MF places "product reviews" in their catalogs disguised as ads - a deceptive practice that I despise.  I could see that MF was going to steal user reviews for their "product reviews" so I did not want my work appearing in such context.

Musicians Friend alienated a lot of discussion forum members when they completely revamped the discussion webpages.  Not only did they become more user hostile, but in the interest of promoting sales the ad-to-content ratio went up - fewer posts were displayed on a single page while more ads were shoehorned into the page.  The search function no longer worked.  The fonts and layout of the pages were hard on the eyes.  It was blatantly obvious that the new forum system was far from ready for prime time.  Members complained, but moderators were powerless as their objections were overruled by MF.  After months of outcry, MF finally reverted back to the old system but the damage had been done as many members had already abandoned the forum community - including me.  MF have since gone back to the new forum system with the objectional attributes reduced, but it is no longer the active community it once was.

Harmony Central used to have some very useful primers on signal processing such as delays, reverb, compression, etc.  They were excellent education tools with clear concise explanations, diagrams, and audio samples.  They covered just about everything out there, I always liked learning something new, and they were valuable information that is all too often missing from owners manuals of signal processors.  I referred to those tools on my Korg SDD-3300 page so that users could understand now to design their own patches.  But Musicians Friend removed ALL those primers in their redesign of Harmony Central and my SDD-3300page had a dead link that was brought to my attention.  We tried in vain to find those primers but they are missing in action.

As a result of these actions, Musicians Friend is far from it and they are officially on my ban list.