Hi Everyone,
This is the combined Voting and Discussion thread.
Thanks to all that entered the competition.
Please use this thread to cast your votes for your favourite entries to Fretboard Challenge #6.
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Voting System - voters can pick their top 3 favourite entries.
First choice gets 5 points - Second choice gets 3 points - Third choice gets 1 point
Entry with the most points wins.
Simply post in this thread your top three choices for winner in order, 1st choice first etc etc. ----------------------------------------------------------
(Note for Entrants of the competition: Self Voting is
NOT Allowed)
The
winner will be announced just before midnight on the 31st January, voting will close at 11.30pm on that day.
(you can edit your vote up to the time voting closes)
A reminder of the competition Guidlines:
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In recognition of the centenary of World War I,
this competition requires the entrants to compose a piece of music that
reflects the words in celebrated war poet Sigfried Sassoon's "The Rank
Stench of Those Bodies Haunts Me Still". This poem is a
stark reminder of the horrors of war.
There is no time limit to
this challenge, please feel free to use any instruments or samples you
like to enable you to reflect on these words.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Entries: (in no particular order) (Entrants - please contact me if there are any mistakes with your uploads)
Please see all the entries uploaded on SoundCloud HERE in the FB Challenge #6 playlist.
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TheColourBox
TTony
SamZadgan
Fretwired
Nomad
SteamAbacus
Old Is Gold
Comments
There are some excellent tracks .. I immediately liked @Nomad and @SteamAbacas but I will listen to the others again.
Top work everybody.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
@Antique_Guitars Can you attach SamZadgan's text to his entry on SoundCloud (or on here). I managed to search it out (it's an early post on the other thread) and it really compliment's Sam's epic.
@Alnico Thanks for the nice comments. You get to vote for 2nd and 3rd place too - 5pts for 1st, 3pts for 2nd, 1 pt for third. Makes voting a little more exciting and Sheldon's job working out the winner a little more complicated.
By way of background as to why mine is such a cacophony of dreadful noise, its essentially randomly chopped up national anthems of European countries involved in the war (France, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Italy) on various combinations of orchestral instruments. I was trying to show the mixed up plot of the war and the nationalities mixed up in it.
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic
good idea to give background on the track...
the reason mine is dreadfull noise is because i can't really play guitar...i just hit some strings and see what happens...
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic
They're all great, though. @Fretwired 's entry just screamed The Pink Floyd (and it's always THE Pink Floyd to this old hippy) from the first chord! And I appreciated the 'cuppa tea' insight as well, being as I'm partial to a brew myself. @TTony 's track really captured the feeling of endless knackered marching to god-knows-where and the use of the text sample was very effective.
On the podium this time.....
3rd (1 point) @Nomad 'Short Requiem'
Sombre and reflective. Very effective, too. The 'chorale' sound brought to mind some of Popol Vuh / Florian Fricke's soundtrack work (Aguirre, Wrath of God).
2nd (3 points) @samzadgan '#6'
A real epic. I liked the text you wrote to accompany this, a great sense of narrative. And that guitar sound! Proper gnarly. And played with real conviction, too. It just left me thinking, "Where's the band, dude?". Would be even more epic with a powerful rhythm section.
1st (5 points) @thecolourbox 'Heels To The Sky'
Excellent piece. I love the dream-like (nightmarish?) feel to this. A sense of marching again but to some mad cacophony of national ideals. And through it, the sanity of the lone voice slowly emerging from the hubbub and ending with the last line. Very well executed (maybe not the right word in this context?). I like that you presented an overarching concept rather than the literal details of the text. I feel you captured both the comradeship across national boundaries and the despair at the madness of the situation in the original poem. Well done.
Which leaves my own piece. I said in the other thread that 95% of the substance of my track (drum loop, rhythm guitar, backwards guitar textures and lead guitar) was done in about 15 minutes using my JamMan looper recorded live onto a minidisc recorder. I just sat down and played whatever came to mind. The remaining 'polish' was done on the computer (Cubase SX) and took AGES in comparison. I recorded a bass line quickly enough, just a simple one-take underpinning of the chords but then spent quite a few hours dialling in the bass sound (Amplitube3 free plug-in) and editing the 'battle sounds' into the track. (These were something titled WW1 Battle Sounds' that I already had on my computer from some unfinished project. I'm not sure where I downloaded them from?). Finally, I had to put the 'breathing' track on. Due to both computer noise and outside street noise, I decided to record these on my Pocketrak portable recorder in a quiet room at the back of my flat, monitoring a minidisc recording of the backing track on headphones as I gasped and panted into a microphone. What we do for art!
As for what my piece means? Well, I'm with Zappa when he said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" but I'll try and give some idea. I wasn't in the frame of mind to engage with anything too depressing and, for me, what comes across in the poem is a sense of empathy and shared humanity with the enemy. My theme was the engagement with, and overcoming of, Post Traumatic Stress. The feeling of being 'bogged down' by these traumatic experiences but finding the energy to push through, transforming negative emotions into positive ones. The 'mud' of the title is meant both literally and figuratively. I particularly like the photograph I found - three German soldiers helping a Frenchman out of the lethally engulfing mud. That same sense of human comradeship overcoming petty national differences.
My votes
1st place @Fretwired
Lovely stuff & very atmospheric and fitting. Enjoyed it a lot. Couldn't resist playing along and as other have said very Floydlike in places.
2nd place @Steamabacus
Had a more heroic sort of vibe which I liked but was perhaps not quite as fitting. Also Floydlike in it's own way. Was missing some nice lead guitar and again started to play along. Then the guitar came in and good it was too. Pehaps would have liked a bit more variation.
3rd Place @TTony
Atmospheric and fitting. Great use of the vocal sample throughout the piece. I know it's not necessary but for me would have liked to hear some guitar work.
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic
5 points to @TTony - I liked the the way the poetry was weaved into the music and I liked the re-sampling of the sample - very innovative. I liked the electronic ebb and flow of the music that matched the poetry. Very clever and inventive.
3 points to @nomad - I'd thought of doing something similar although I think this track is far better than anything I'd have produced. Very emotional music ..
1 point to @SamZadgan - the sheer emotion of this single guitar track is immense .. no bass .. no drums .. great track. Raw emotion.
I voted for these tracks as I thought they met the brief .. however all the tracks were excellent.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
my votes are:
1st: @TheColourBox
Loved the dreamy (i think it was said before) atmosphere to it. It had elements of industrial harshness to it, which fits the bill so well. For me I was less music and more something that brings up imagary and puts you in a certain mood or enviroment..not sure if it makes sense, basically i felt it!
2nd: @Nomad
very emotional from the very begining and kept a good amount of tension and remained dark through out the whole peice. It was really well done without being cheesy as those kinds of things can be.
3rd: @TTony
or should I say DJ TT...very cool use of the poetry sample and looping it with the beat and the bass line etc. I could see this kind of composition could have gotten a little happy, but the beat and melody gave it a very eerie mood.
As for my piece, well, the story came first. Living in Australia for 25+ years the whole Gallipoli thing gets drilled in pretty well. When I thought WW1 the first thing that came to mind was the theme of Gallipoli and the men who left Australia, who had not seen anything of the world, going to this foreign place that they may have only seen in books. But the tragedy being that a lot of them would die before they even step foot on land. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
A couple of the riffs are a bit older and draw on a little bit of middle eastern background. The rest came as result of just riffing those parts and thinking about those first few minutes of warfare when those soldiers steps out and were under fire and trying to survive.
As for technique/recording etc, i would have loved to have gone to the effort of using software and putting beats and bass on it. Even though it would be my first time doing that, i was up for it. But having a 2 year old and a new 6 week old baby meant time was very very limited...i only managed to play guitar a few times and this song has only been played through in its entirety a handful of times...and this was the best take.
BTW...no excuses, i'm really happy with how it turned out...but would have loved to make it a proper song with a rhythm section and quotes from the poem, or narrative of the story.
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My trading feedback thread
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My trading feedback thread
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic