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I'm responding to feedback newmajoe and others gave in the DoD Discord following this decision, so any quotes are from there: newmajoe was upset that his second panel decision took too long to be made and that he got conflicting feedback between the first and second decisions. In Joe's case, this second decision actually took only 4 days. It'll seem like I'm trying to take arrows for the judges and direct the issues to me. I'm just saying that they actually weighed in very quickly. I saw at several points that Joe was upset about not hearing back sooner, and being encouraged to resubmit the track, but I'M the one who made that process take longer, and I'm the one who encouraged him to resubmit. That's all on me alone for delaying releasing his specific decision because I wanted to fully explore: 1) whether the track should be examined as potentially outside of our Submissions Standards [which didn't get analyzed/criticized as an issue in the first vote]; 2) whether it meant we had to revise the wording in our Standards [we decided no changes in the wording needed to be made]; and 3) how to summarize letting Joe down, especially because any rejection can feel on some unavoidable level like a value judgement on the musician's skills and abilities. Couldn't have said that better. For that last part, I'll see what I can do to add a point in our Judges Panel FAQ (to do our best) to short-circuit that negative interpretation of a NO vote; not a "solution" but making clear we recognize that artists can take rejections personally when they shouldn't. We actually didn't need to clarify the wording of the Submission Standards, because the current wording we had explained why the judges didn't pass it the second time: ("The source material must be identifiable and dominant.") Re: Joe's points above, the spoken word/narration using in-game text (vs. completely original narration) wouldn't be a factor for or against the track. It was mainly about: 1) the spoken word feeling like the "dominant" element of the track; and 2) the VGM arrangement feeling like "subordinate" accompaniment. It's very rare that a submission viewed as falling outside of the submissions standards by the judges panel even makes it to the panel in the first place; we'd never encountered this kind of piece. I paneled this due to me assuming the narration style wasn't a problem for OCR's standards. Yep, I'm sorry that we collectively messed up here with poor communication within the two decisions; we should have recognized and hashed out the Standards concern the first time, not the second time, and Joe was justifiably mad. Again, part of it was due to me being in favor of the track yet being out of step with the other Js, which is also pretty rare. Had I known it would have been a Standards issue on this level, other Js and I would have never encouraged Joe to tweak it or resubmit it in the first place, so he should blame me for that too. I never intended to "waste his time" or stress Joe out, and ended up doing both. I could have let Joe know that it wouldn't be posted right after seeing how the resub's votes landed, but, as jmr correctly noted, this actually was an unprecedented situation for us, so I also wanted to: 1) have most of the panel fully consider our Submissions Standards wording vs. this type of track, since it wasn't thoroughly considered by the group the first time; and 2) exhaust every chance to make my case, again something where I'm to blame. We did speak with djp on it, and with the vote so lopsided, he stood by the panel's consensus from their reasoning. Several people chimed in to praise my demeanor or perspective. I do appreciate being called "rad" and being vouched for by several people. Unfortunately, I'm far from perfect - the time it took to handle all of this and the process of summarizing & delivering the bad news, that was 100% my direction and my responsibility, and something I have to learn from to improve our process. (BTW, holding up the voting on PuD's "The Hot Pink of Blues", that was me too, which I stood by; I wasn't counting what I perceived as implied chord progressions as direct source tune usage. So I get plenty of bad guy points. :-D)

Larry, you are wrong in stressing that the "source material" line is what the track violated. Source usage was not the issue, and this track isn't a standards violation as it seems to be framed in your subsequent posts in the thread post-decision. The entire work showcases material from the game, narration included. The issue was that The Little Girl and the Star largely centers a non-musical performance of the story from the game. As I said in my vote, the vocal performance is a narration. It's not sung, it's not rapped, nor is it recited as beat poetry. The narration takes the lead and the musical backing track supports it. Joe frames that as a bias but I will argue that it's a very valid distinction for us to make with regards to what we showcase in the OCR catalog. We would not post a track that, for example, takes a scene from a popular JRPG and recreates it as a full-cast audio drama with acted dialogue and the music from the game arranged in the background. A track like that would not be a standards violation either because everything is taken from the game; the issue would be that it's not wholly or in-majority a musical work. Now, I don't want to get into defining quantitative standards here; I don't want to go down the road where we're saying "At least 75% of the track should primarily be musical in nature" because then we're both inviting tracks that will skirt close to 25% non-musical performance and also that's just more stopwatching, which I personally am just not a fan of. This track is a very unique case. I understand that our standards don't specifically call out "non-musical performance" as a limiting factor. I think that this is just part of judging though; we're presented with a track that challenges our view of what fits into what we want OCR to showcase, and we make the judgement call in that evaluation. I personally am sorry I didn't catch this on the first go-around; I didn't see the first decision and I was specifically asked when the second thread went up by Dave to weigh in, which is the first I heard the track and when I made my opinion very clear that this track is not a fit for OCR.

Gear does help some, but the skills and experience are more important. It takes time to experiment and improve. These skills don't happen overnight. Another key skill is using your ears critically. Knowing what works and what doesn't takes time to develop. Try things...if they don't work, oh well; move on and try something else. With all that being said, don't neglect the arrangement side of things either. Both are equally important when it comes to putting together a track. We all have potential, and again; it just takes time to get there.