Algoritm Song Competition: The Winners!

[selig]

I beg of you, give me a link to a dictionary which has this broadest sense of the word song which means any piece of music, because I think I might be going crazy here. To me that sounds like "boxing was meant in the broadest sense - you know, where you can use guns, rocks and roundhouse kicks".

OK, though I've been in the music business for far too many years, much of that in Nashville where songwriters are king, I've never stopped to read the dictionary definition of "song" before today. And yes, you are 100% correct with the idea that a song contains lyrics, or is "suggestive of a song" if not (whatever that means). And in the future it may be best to only use "Song" to mean lyrics/vocals. But…

…the "problem" IMO is that just about EVERYONE uses the word "song" in their competition name or description. In a quick search over the last year I found three "song competitions" here at ReasonTalk, most of which had instrumental tracks submitted/winning (didn't do a full scientific study on this, there may be more "song" competitions, and there may be more vocal entries, aka "songs", than I found).
Even the Reason 1.0 competition announcement on Twitter says: "𝑪𝑨𝑵 𝒀𝑶𝑼 𝑴𝑨𝑲𝑬 𝑨 𝑺𝑶𝑵𝑮 𝑼𝑺𝑰𝑵𝑮 𝑶𝑵𝑳𝒀 𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑺𝑶𝑵 1 𝑫𝑬𝑽𝑰𝑪𝑬𝑺?"

So, much like calling tracks "stems", calling the act of setting basic levels in a DAW "gain staging", or even calling Live "Ableton", seems everyone is using "Song" to mean "composition". And just like "sick", "bad", "cool", now have totally different meanings, expect more words to follow, and choose your battles (semantics matter totally to me with technical descriptive terms, in music terms not so much).

[Re8et]

This was seriously fun; when so much quality tracks hits the deadline, it's because we have a great Synth.
So Congrats to the winners, the devs, the preset masters! And the Judges!
I also liked SnapperBjorke a lot, but thats personale taste, Aeox listening is crystalline, alas it's been a fair one!

[stratatonic]

I suppose, technically, all these challenges should say "Composition" rather than "Song". But, I've been using "song" all my life to mean any musical entity - "Check out this $#%$# song, man! " (YYZ - even though it was an instrumental...on an album that had vocals on all other tracks). And so has every one else I know. Guess our education system just sucks.

Congrats to all the winners. I consider them worthy of 1-2-3. I especially like how Hurricane coaxed out really good sounds out of the Algoritm synth - especially the bass. Reason Studios will want to use your song (whoops!) and patches as a Reason+ Pack.

Hold out for a good return! (And please DM that bass patch before my trial expires next week...)

[Jackjackdaw]

What's the dictionary definition of a pedant?

[guitfnky]

What's the dictionary definition of a pedant?

and we have a winner! (not of the song contest, though)

[hurricane]

I think some people (or maybe just one guy) are taking the word "song" too literally. The goal of this contest was not to showcase your songwriting prowess and your mastery of the craft of songwriting. This wasn't a songwriting competition. The contest was meant to showcase the Algoritm synthesizer via a song/track/piece/tune, etc. I obviously was not a judge, but I imagine the judges had certain criteria they were expecting to be met. If you managed to hit those points AND packaged it in a somewhat competent "tune", then you probably did ok.

[guitfnky]

the irony is, it says right in the contest rules that you MAY use non-Algoritm instruments like vocals, not that you had to—the definition of what was expected was as clear as it could get.

[EdwardKiy]

the irony is, it says right in the contest rules that you MAY use non-Algoritm instruments like vocals, not that you had to—the definition of what was expected was as clear as it could get.

here are the rules.

rules.JPG

[guitfnky]

the irony is, it says right in the contest rules that you MAY use non-Algoritm instruments like vocals, not that you had to—the definition of what was expected was as clear as it could get.

here are the rules.

rules.JPG

yes, that says what I said it said. thanks for confirming.

[Jagwah]

heh

[challism]

This was a very difficult contest to judge. Probably the most difficult one thus far; so many great entries. Similar to what Loque said, my top 10 were really hard to narrow down, and none of them deserved to be #10 or 9 or 8, etc. It was a very close contest, with only a point separating many of the entries. I think all the judges would agree this contest was not easy to judge. I'm very proud of all the contestants, and you should all feel proud, even if you didn't "win", you still won.

Edward has a point about the use of the word song. Like Selig, I've never actually looked the word up in the dictionary. I always just assumed it was a general term for any piece of music. But most dictionary definitions mention vocals, lyrics, poems, singing. However, I think the meaning of the word in popular culture is more loosely used than the textbook definition; most people call instrumental pieces songs, too. But to keep things totally clear for future contests, we shouldn't use the word "song".

For what it's worth, Edward, I really liked your song, especially your vocals.

[hurricane]

Congrats guys and @Hurricane OMG that brass sounds unbelievably realistic, love the 80s vibe!

Credit the sound designer on that one because I used the Brass Section patch and I might have simply lowered the reverb a little, but it's such a good brass patch that I didn't have to do anything to it. Getting it to sound realistic comes down to two things: 1) playing it like Brass, and I mean not playing the part like a synth because then it will come out sounding fake and synth-like, so I played it like how I thought a brass section would sound, and 2) using pitch and modulation to make it bend like brass.

I especially like how Hurricane coaxed out really good sounds out of the Algoritm synth - especially the bass.

The bass is a little more complex as it is 3 different bass parts kind of complementing each other, however the main bass is my custom patch where I used 2 Osc modules to create a Juno-y chorused patch made out of 2 saws panned L/R, with a FM sine down the middle for support. I put it in a combinator so that I could control both filters and the release. The other two basses I used are Club Bouncer and Clicky Bass, both slightly tweaked and playing different parts.

It was all very simple and I am sure you'll find it underwhelming, but here it is.

eebass.png

Electric Eyes Juno Bass.cmb.zip

[strangers]

Congrats to the winners. This was a great contest with such a wide variety of songs. It would be cool to see the winner interviews come back that happened with a few contests in the past.

[Noplan]

Congrats to the winners. Well deserved.

[Gungnir]

I just want to point out, that you sent in some great tunes for the competition. Some of them were a bit better than others, and a few more songs were even better than all the rest. My final top 10 list felt so bad, because every song was great and the last one in that list didn't deserved to be the last one. But i need to make decisions and in the end there were just some small differences.

Even if your song didn't won, all of you made great music and the voting was really hard!

Gratulation to the first places to get a cool synth on top of their great music!

Thanks for confirming that. I was glad I was not in any jugde’s shoes here.

I know this is not your table, but given the efforts shown here, a small discount on the synth for the contributers could be in order. Not that we in particular need the synth, but for the priniciple of it. Think we would buy it as souvenir for the principle of it.

Kind Regards
ToH

[hurricane]

Quarmat - check your Reasontalk DMs, I sent you a patch.

[Quarmat]

Quarmat - check your Reasontalk DMs, I sent you a patch.

Received! Thank you Hurricane!