Music Contest Idea

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Music Contest #1: Races

Races
Contestants will choose a race from warcraft lore and develop a musical piece around that race. Though the piece does not have to be used as background music for WC3, it should be related to the race in a way that makes sense.
(Example: If I chose trolls as my race, I can include a percussion part that includes tribal drums. I can explain that by saying trolls live a shamanistic life style so they would use tribal drums. But if I included some thrash metal guitar riffs, I can't say "they are awesome just like trolls". It must make sense.)

List of some Races

Human
Dwarve
Blood Elf
Night Elf
Orc
Troll
Tauren
Ogre
Naga
Undead
Nerubian
Elemental (Water Elementals, Reef Elementals, Fire Lord, etc.)
Centaur
Draenei
Demon/Eredar
Furbolg
Gnoll
Harpy
Kobold
Dragon
Magnataur
Murloc/Mur'gul
Razormane/Quillboar
Satyr
Tuskarr

(Though it doesn't matter if two contestants choose the same race, we have a nice wide selection here, lets get a variety)

• No submission may violate any of the site rules.
• If a submission does not follow the Rules of the contest the creator will be disqualified.
• All submissions must follow the current theme. If any musical piece does not fit, a moderator will tell you as soon as possible as to avoid confusion.
• Your submission must be posted before the deadline. Your post must include the music in an accepted file Format (MP3, OGG, or MIDI) and an accompanying explanation of the song (i.e. explain how it fits into the theme).
• Your submission may not be started/made before the official launch of the contest.
• Judges and/or hosts may not participate.
• Your final submission must be finished and logically conclude and start.
• Teamwork is not allowed.
• You may not include long periods of silence in your song - rests are allowed but using 30 seconds of continuous silence simply to fill up space is not allowed.
• Your song must include at least 2 parts(You basically can't have an entire song containing only a single instrument soloing)
• You must post at least 1 WiP before the deadline so your final work can be verified as your own.
• Minimum length is 1 minute, there is no maximum length (please keep it reasonable, 20 minute entries may create the necessity for a maximum length).
• Any method of music production is allowed, including using Sequencers, Virtual Instruments, Sound Samples (granted you provide the source of the original sound sample) and standard recording.
• Contestants may use any program to create their music. Essentially, the only part that is judged or limited is the final product.
• No former works can be submitted, the piece must be new and created to fit the theme.
• All entries must be accompanied by an explanation of how the song fits into the theme and the chosen race. The Race that you have chosen must be clearly indicated in the final entry post.
• Vocals can be used, though the part being judged is the overall sound. Essentially the Vocals are being treated as if they were Instruments. Since this is a music contest, the sound is the product being judged, not the lyrics.
• Though Sampling is allowed, it must be within reason:
  1. If you use an instrument sound sample for a Sampling VSI (basically if you just use the sound for the instrument, and make it play your music) you must provide the source of the sound, be it a website or an individual.
  2. SAMPLING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE OWNER IS ILLEGAL, AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.
  3. You may use Royalty free sound samples - but you must provide the source of the sample.
  4. The final song must be at least 75% of your writing - In essence, you can use a royalty free drum loop (or other form of sampled material) in your song, but if you chose to you must create enough of the other material or use in such a way that it can be said that YOU wrote 75% of the song. Samples of instruments simply to be used for a sequencer (like building a drum line out of specific drums or using a pitch altering sampler to make a melody out of a sound sample from an instrument) are exempt from the 75% rule.

• First Place: 40 reputation points and your entry on an award icon
  
• Second Place: 25 reputation points and an award icon
  
• Third Place: 15 reputation points and an award icon

• Midnighters
• Tell us if you want to judge!

Theme	How well does it fit in with the theme and your selected race?	/30
Creativity/Originality	How original is the piece? How creative are you with the theme/instruments/etc.	/20
Dynamic/Tonation	Basically, how well does it flow? Are accents used to good effect? Do overall levels make sense? etc.	/20
Composition	How well is it composed? Do the key changes make sense?	/30

75% of the final score shall be determined by the contest's appointed judges.
25% of the final score shall be determined by a public poll.​

• The contest shall begin on January 25th and conclude on currently undecided, GMT

Here are some free to use resources that can get you started:​

• Audacity: Free Audio recording program - though you have to start a new track every time you record (cut and paste across tracks to deal with this), this handy audio program has nearly no latency (non-noticeable) and is a great start for people recording actual instruments.
• ModPlug Tracker: A tracker composing program. Pretty easy to use and powerful. Doesn't come with very many instruments although more are easy to get.
• NoteWorthy Composer: Another composing program that relies heavily on sheet music.
• FL Studio (formerly known as Fruity Loops): Another powerful composer. Has a bit of a steep learning curve and also is not free but there is a trial version you can use.
• Switch Audio Converter: Free audio file changing program - can convert to less commenly used audio file types like RAW's and Orggis Vorbis along with the big ones like MP3's (Can convert iTunes locked format too).
• Psycle: A free sequencer type program - similar to Mod Plug. Has a bit of a learning curve, though it's pretty powerful when used correctly.
• Mp3 Direct Cut: Simplistic audio editing program that allows you to edit Mp3 directly, from their original file (don't forget to back up the original).
• Krystal Audio Engine: Similar to Audacity, though this program is tooled more towards people editing or mixing music - recording can generate some terrible latency. (Essentially its more powerful then Audacity, but much more difficult to record a sound directly to it)
• Hammerhead Rythm Station: A free drum machine that has built in sounds geared towards Electronica and Dance music. Also supports importing your own drum sounds via userbanks (some userbanks are provided on the site) and the entire sound library can be edited if you get more advanced with it - Drum parts can be exported as wav's and then used in your music. You will want to use Switch Audio engine if you plan on importing your own sounds as it only supports the RAW format.
• Suggest some more!

 

[tee.dubs]

you should add 'use of dynamics' to the criteria, and change 'how well does it flow' to something more to do with the composition of the song, as thats what you're trying to say i think. Non the less, its a great idea and i would love to participate!

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Hopefully enough people are interested to make this work. The whole flowing thing was a place holder pretty much as I still havent worked out everything about this, but hopefully this contest will get somewhere.

K revising the first post.

Also if anyone has a theme in mind, feel free to give suggestions

 

[Pyritie]

if it's the first contest, sometimes either no theme or something very broad helps to see who's interested

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Well a very broad theme is probably the best option, having no theme at all will leave little to judge the pieces on - since contestants could submit a wide variety of different types of music, from orchestral pieces to 8 bit background music, you probably need a theme to tie it all together.

My guess would be that it's probably the best to base the first theme on a Race from Warcraft. Either choose a specefic one, like Troll maybe for example, or let the contestants choose the race on their own (would allow for me flexibility).

 

[CoBrA b]

HELL YEAH! You actually beat me to suggesting this. I've been wanting to see how my composing skills compare to those of others. I also like the idea of using races for a theme, and I think it would be a good idea to let contestants choose for themselves (it would give more variety to the compositions and instrument choices).

While a poll would be interesting, I do not think that there should be one, simply for the reason that musical tastes differ so widely from person to person, and letting several random people, who may vote only for submissions of a certain genre (judging by the "what's your favorite type of music" polls, almost no one would vote for my neo-romantic stuff) is probably a bad idea. I think that the winners should be determined by judges who are as unbiased as possible toward any one style.

Oh, and you also might want to consider thematic development as one of the criteria for judging, as it is a huge factor in many compositions.

Hope to see this hosted and ready to go soon.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Its good to see people are interested in this, I was starting to get discouraged after this went a few days with only a couple views.

Yeah, it seems that letting people choose a race to base it off of is the best option, I'll add that to the first post.

Though I also don't think popular poll is necessary, I'll leave the option open for a little bit longer to see if anyone can come up with a convincing argument for it, but In the end I don't think it will make it into the final contest.

Judging criteria is still completely open to suggestions. Maybe you could get a little bit more specific when you say "thematic development". I like the idea, it just needs to be worded into something concrete that is indisputable.

 

[DudeSpirit]

I support this 100%, and the theme is perfect; already giving me a ton of ideas.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Revised the first post a bit

 

[tee.dubs]

are you going to make a list of the races? because i have no idea how many or what races there are. There's orc, night elf, human, naga, and orc as far as i know. Are any others included?

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Well to give entrants the widest range, let's just include all Races from the Wc3 lore (playable or otherwise). I'll add a list - if you see that I have neglected any feel free to bring it up.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Bump - Revised the first post a little bit

 

[tee.dubs]

And what about scores? will they need to be submitted with the final entry? and what file formats should they be in? mp3, wma or ogg i'd presume...

 

[CoBrA b]

And what about scores? will they need to be submitted with the final entry? and what file formats should they be in? mp3, wma or ogg i'd presume...

I, personally, think it would be a good idea to submit the scores with the final entries.

As for file types, I'd probably just say any format which could be played on an average media player (let's say Windows Media Player) The reason for this is that the software I have can only make MIDI files (unfortunately), which play fine on most players (I got some software (SynthFont) to convert the MIDIs to mp3s, but, in my opinion, it wrecks the sound). Still, though, if we are going to restrict it to those three types, I could probably find a way to convert them, and, if not, find a different composing software. I'm using this one, right now, and I'm pretty satisfied with it: NoteWorthy Composer. If anyone knows a good way to convert files from this to mp3s, and/or a better program (prefferably free or cheap), please tell me.

EDIT: Or we could all just upload our music to Youtube. I'm not sure I like this idea, though, but it would make many things easier. However, if we decided to do it this way, I would still have to find a way to convert my music into a suitable format.

 

[Pyritie]

The reason for this is that the software I have can only make MIDI files (unfortunately)

get better software then

modplug is a good place to start

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

-Any format that works on a standard player (I would say, Windows Media, Raphsady or perhapes even Winamp would be fine standards). I'll add that in there.

-Well understanding that you write orchestral pieces scores are very important, but I'm reluctant to make that a requirement for people who write other forms of music - lets say Techno for example, which a score is less likely to be used. A score would be a good boost if lets, say your performance was less then admirable (not everybody uses comp generated sounds lol). So considering all this, some form of presentation that presents the music's written part - something standard that anyone who has musical knowledge should be able to understand, and then could reproduce - to allow to leave the option slightly open.


I don't exactly like relying on Youtube for submissions - relying on a site other then THW itself seems unnecessary. I would say upload your final submission to a final "Submission Thread" would work perfectly fine. I don't know if IE has the option, but Firefox users can even listen to the music directly from the site. Converting to a video is pretty unnecessary.

 

[X-OMG-X]

Why didnt you launch this contest a few months earlier?
It could be quite nice with some wc3-fitting background music in the mapping contest

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Why didnt you launch this contest a few months earlier?
It could be quite nice with some wc3-fitting background music in the mapping contest

Well a few months earlier I was scoping the site out to see if there would be enough people interested It seems like there's enough people to make the contest go through, and have a successful and competitive contest, but it most likely won't be as large as the other forms of contests that have been going on for a while (Once the contest has started and it gets more notice, most likely more people will join).

Looking through the archives, I see that this is the 3rd time that a contest like this has been suggested - hopefully this time it will get some where.


-Thinking over the whole issue on submitting a Score, I'm starting to doubt the usefulness of submitting one. The music (final product) is whats being judged of course so I'm not entirely sure its necessary - It may help with judging, but once again there's the issue of composing style here: the contest is completely open to whatever form of music the contestants want to write, and thus they would be equipped accordingly. A orchestral composer would doubtfully have a program or method of producing a final score for their music, while a less equipped musician piecing together music through something like Audacity would run into a road block there - I'm not entirely sure of what programs are out there, but unless anyone knows of a Free Score production program, I may be forced to remove this to make the contest fair.
(As of now, I know for sure that there will be Orchestral music submissions, there are many great composers already active (relatively) in the music forums. What I'm not sure of, is what other types of musicians the contest will attract - unless we have a singularly Orchestral Contest, we may be in for a large variety of music styles (I want to leave it as open as possible, as to not stifle creativity))

 

[JetFangInferno]

If anything, I may either participate or judge since I have acute ears, am very sensitive to the most meticulous of details, and can write short -- or lengthy if need be, critiques. But anyhow, this sounds like a great idea and it's about time we shed some light on such a understated theme. As for WherewolfTherewolf, Windows users can the demo of NoteworthyComposer, a free composition program capable of releasing the scores if the contest desires so, but the evaluation version only allows 9 free saves per file. Other programs include but are not limited to Finale, Garageband (for Mac users), and Sibelius.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

WherewolfTherewolf, Windows users can the demo of NoteworthyComposer, a free composition program capable of releasing the scores if the contest desires so, but the evaluation version only allows 9 free saves per file. Other programs include but are not limited to Finale, Garageband (for Mac users), and Sibelius.

Well I don't know if 9 free saves on a trial program warrants making the score a requirement (and I don't want to support pirating ) - I understand the wealth of programs offered, but as with most Music Software, it is incredibly expensive unless you buy an incredibly limited version of the software. I want to keep this contest as open as possible to all who may want to join, so even people running completely free tools can still have a chance at winning if their creativity tops that of others using the best programs money can buy.

 

[Pyritie]

get better software then

modplug is a good place to start

>___>

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

get better software then

modplug is a good place to start

That conversation was on the score of your music (you know, the sheet music) - I don't use it, but I'm pretty sure Mod Plug doesn't print scores

 

[JetFangInferno]

If we don't include sheet music as a judging criterion, then our problem is solved. Besides, what is the purpose of judging sheet music? Cleanliness (barring eight notes etc.)? Music Theory (only certain genres pertain to music theory)?

 

[tee.dubs]

i only mentioned it because it would filter out all the people who just muck around on acid (just like in the 70's haw haw) and have no idea what they're doing and somehow get this song that all the voters like because they think it's cool. In hindsight though, i shouldn't have mentioned it. i only ever use audacity and mainly percussive instruments and guitar effects, and it'd be a bitch of a chore to record and transcribe all the different parts and rhythms. sorry guys

 

[NearbyHermit]

I say it rocks,this is a great idea indeed !

Death metal for the Draenei

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Death metal for the Draenei

You better come up with a better explanation then they both start with a D if you do that lol

i only mentioned it because it would filter out all the people who just muck around on acid (just like in the 70's haw haw) and have no idea what they're doing and somehow get this song that all the voters like because they think it's cool. In hindsight though, i shouldn't have mentioned it. i only ever use audacity and mainly percussive instruments and guitar effects, and it'd be a bitch of a chore to record and transcribe all the different parts and rhythms. sorry guys

K, Ill remove the need for sheet music - Oh and about the voters, as of now currently Public Poll is not going to be in the judging, I'm leaving the option open in case theres popular demand for such, but atm it seems like that would be pointless and be more of a judge of whats the hives favorite genre

If we don't include sheet music as a judging criterion, then our problem is solved. Besides, what is the purpose of judging sheet music? Cleanliness (barring eight notes etc.)? Music Theory (only certain genres pertain to music theory)?

Well any form of music can be transcribed into sheet music, since notes are universal - but it doesn't matter anymore so lets just leave it at that.

 

[DudeSpirit]

Well i just hope i get my computer fixed by the time the competition kicks in.
I've got tons of ideas written down, can't wait for this one.

Going to use a licensed version of FL Studio 8, should have no problems with formats or such.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

K - added a section that provides links to suggested resources for people new to making music (Mod plug, Audacity, etc.).


I'm not sure about this, but I was thinking that in some genres like Electronica, Dance, Rap, sampling can sometimes be a big part of the song - taking parts of preexisting songs and editing them, and using them for part of your own song. Though sampling copyrighted music without the consent of the creator is illegal, should we allow sampling royalty free music as long as the original creator is credited and the sampled part used in some way original that it can effectively called a part of your own song and not a rip?

-This also goes for Royalty free loops like Drum Loops

 

[DudeSpirit]

Well the judges should count that in the evaluation then, if someone takes samples from other authors.

 

[tee.dubs]

K - added a section that provides links to suggested resources for people new to making music (Mod plug, Audacity, etc.).


I'm not sure about this, but I was thinking that in some genres like Electronica, Dance, Rap, sampling can sometimes be a big part of the song - taking parts of preexisting songs and editing them, and using them for part of your own song. Though sampling copyrighted music without the consent of the creator is illegal, should we allow sampling royalty free music as long as the original creator is credited and the sampled part used in some way original that it can effectively called a part of your own song and not a rip?

-This also goes for Royalty free loops like Drum Loops

It's a given that people will be using some kind of sampling software, so i guess that makes sense. but i think it should pertain some sort of boundary regarding sampling - such as a 75% original engineered audio rule or something.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Well the judges should count that in the evaluation then, if someone takes samples from other authors.

Well I would say that falls under originality

It's a given that people will be using some kind of sampling software, so i guess that makes sense. but i think it should pertain some sort of boundary regarding sampling - such as a 75% original engineered audio rule or something.

Yeah that seems to make sense - 75 it is (I'll add that in a few minutes)

 

[Pyritie]

By the way I'd like it if you could clean up the first post so it looks like other contests - don't worry if you don't have the needed images, I can make those

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

By the way I'd like it if you could clean up the first post so it looks like other contests - don't worry if you don't have the needed images, I can make those

K, I'll get to cleaning it up soon - I'd like to take a shot at making the images but with my terrible comp drawing skills It's probably best if you make them (thanks for that).

-Oh, how do you make the Tables? I don't see a table option under advanced in the reply/edit screen. Is that html code? (I used to know that a little, I could probably look it up if need be)

 

[Pyritie]

Just copy something from the templates

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Wow just noticed that - k updating

 

[NearbyHermit]

You better come up with a better explanation then they both start with a D if you do that lol

Lol,that was a failure line !

Simply because I like Draenei and Death metal is the coolest genre!


If I were to say something serious ,I would say that Draenei fit a futuristic theme,with strange sounds ,Stracraft-ish !
Is this because Draenei remind much of the Protoss?

 

[tee.dubs]

hopefully this is gonna be my last pester, but are one-shot drums included as sampling? ie drum machines, and programs that drum beats can be arranged on, but not taken from any existing composition or pre-existing sequence. say, a shot of a snare from a program that is used solely to arrange drum sequences.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

hopefully this is gonna be my last pester, but are one-shot drums included as sampling? ie drum machines, and programs that drum beats can be arranged on, but not taken from any existing composition or pre-existing sequence. say, a shot of a snare from a program that is used solely to arrange drum sequences.

Nah your pestering is fine, your helping perfect the rules for the contest.
One shot drums, like a sample that you are using for your own sequence are not part of the 75% rule - though you should still provide where you got the sound from.

 

[Pyritie]

Thar. Mind finding a banner image?

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Thanks looks much better - yeah I'll look for a banner image

 

[Midnighters]

I would like to judge if possible.

 

[WherewolfTherewolf]

Possible and added