I came across a very interesting website when doing a Google search for Daniel Carson’s (Chris Tomlin’s guitarist) guitars and effects. It’s a kind of database of music gear called Equipboard. The genius thing is it seems to be primarily organized by what pro musicians are using – in my case, a profile page of sorts for Daniel Carson came up, with listings for his Guitars, Amplifiers, Effects Pedals, and a catch-all “Other Gear” section.
I immediately got lost in the rabbit hole of this site, since every piece of gear has its own listing, and there it lists all other artists that have been associated with that piece of gear. The information appears to all be crowd-sourced, so you and I could sign up for an account and start contributing. A common use case to contribute appears to be “gear spotting” something the musician has been seen using on their official Instagram feed, or a fan concert photo revealing a pedalboard or amp.
I did notice the entries appear to have significant levels of moderation, with tags like “needs review,” “needs improvement,” “totally incorrect,” and “correct” being assigned (I’m sure there are more but those are the ones I saw). There also looks to be an active contingent of admins/moderators having oversight on the entries coming in (like Wikipedia, this seems like an important job for a website this size).
Speaking of size, the breadth of content on the site is substantial, covering artist types like guitarists, music producers (both in the recording studio sense and EDM producer/DJ sense), bassists, drummers, and more. Genres are limited to pretty high-level entries like rock, metal, pop, blues, folk, and I found myself wishing for a little more granularity (worship, for instance?).
Equipboard also offers gear buying guides, though these appear to be curated by a staff of writers (including the pair of site creators themselves, who based on their bios are multi-instrumentalists which lends them credibility). The guides are well researched, and I found myself getting lost in a few like my personal quest for a new distortion pedal, or the ever-present endeavor of discovering the best way to improve my guitar skills.
As any worship musician knows, there is a lot of chatter around the web on the best gear for the genre. It would be nice to see Equipboard expand into it eventually (in fact I’ll ping the site owners about it and ask), both in terms of a category to filter by, and seeing some dedicated buying guides around it.
Still, I’m surprised I haven’t come across Equipboard sooner, and I’ll definitely be returning to satisfy my gear usage curiosities, as well as when making some new equipment buying decisions.
Worship or not, this is pretty cool find.