superjoe30

Thanks Brushfire! My room mate and I bought Minecraft the day before beta came out and we've been having a blast. I put together some screenshots of what we've built: Nice glass house to protect spawn. A chest for every material, and for every material a chest! Standing on the roof looking at the beautiful waterfall built by my roommate. The water falls on top of the glass so you can look up and see it. Standing on the high dive looking at the pool in the spawn house. The "higher dive" which also looks down into the pool. You can also see my giant tree house under construction. My giant wheat sky farm. This is on top of the waterfall from the earlier picture. You can also see my cactus farm attached. Reed farm. Why not? Meet "Happy" the Cactus. Lol. I should put a swastika somewhere nearby.

hey dudes, can I play?

Yeah! I hope I get to meet you, jmr.

I disagree with this. Here's a simple example. As a general rule, if you stay in key, your song sounds better. Of course, you can break the rule sometimes, but it sure helps to know about it in the first place. I think you have some really good points here. I think you've hit it right on the nose when you mention more freedom than you can handle. To further illustrate your own point (and for anyone else reading) try this: close your eyes and try to list every English word that you know. You probably know about 20,000 words, but you probably can list maybe 50? Now think about song lyrics that you remember, or a nursery rhyme, or a recent phone conversation with your friend. All the sudden you're using words that you couldn't think of a moment ago. I think what I'm getting at is that, as an amateur, or even as a professional who is trying to be forcibly creative, we need techniques to get by the shear vastness of possibilities to actually get something going.

That makes sense. I think I take that into account though. When I say, "add a new section," this is the part where you open up your mind and let the creativity flow. Do something crazy, allow musical accidents to flourish. I think one of the killers of great music is when the artist settles with something amateur. So the process is about not settling with something that is just O.K. (delete the worst part) as well as generating these cool musical accidents and experiments, AND having the self-discipline to stick with a project until it is truly professional.

Cool, it will be fun to meet you guys. I just secured flight tickets, so there's no turning back now!

Absolutely! Hone in those production skills! I understand why you would say this. Art is more of a left-brain activity where you just kind of try this and that. However, at the same time, it is a science. It's the science of using music to get people to react subconsciously to what they hear. You can't deny that while it may seem like it at times, not all art and music is a magical black box that we can't understand through science and study!

Sign me up! Who else is in your room? Contact info in PM.

According to the Superjoe Method, the way to make the crappy parts not suck is... delete them! Then add a new part. Then take a break. Then delete the crappiest part. Then add a new part. Then take a break. Repeat! I think we can merge our methods. #1 in yours can be done at the same time as #1 in mine. #2 and #3 can be mapped to Take a Break in mine. #4a maps to the entire Superjoe Method, and #4b is giving up in the Superjoe Method.

Thanks JH, this weekly competition has been awesome so far.

I just bought my magfest ticket. Should I reserve a room? I'm down for splitting the room with any ocremix.org member. In fact, I actually enjoy sleeping on the floor as it's good for my back.

I'm interested to hear your results! When you're done I'd like to know: 1. How do you rate your song compared to your goal before you began? 2. How much time did you spend? 3. Did you ever feel "stuck?"

Some people are geniuses and can just kind of do whatever comes to them first and they come up with good music. But for the rest of us, we need to study and learn tricks and practice to do anything worthwhile. I have come up with an algorithm, that anybody can use, to make awesome music. Really, you get to set how awesome the music will be, and then you will make it that good. The catch is that it might take a lot of time. But what it does do is prevent you from feeling stuck, like you can't go on. Okay, here is the algorithm. Given Q, which is the Quality of your song, a.k.a. how awesome it should be: Step 1. Spend an hour or two and just wing it. Do random things, try effects or instruments you've never used before, go with the flow. Maybe start with a theme and work from there. The best way to do this is to Just Do It. One Hour Compos and SolidComposer Arena are good for getting you off your butt and getting Step 1 done. Step 1 only has to be done once. Step 2. Take a break. Step 3. Think about your song. What's the thing you like least about it? Delete it immediately. If you use something like SolidComposer, you'll have version control so you don't have to get it back later if you're worried about losing it forever. Alternately you can just save it as a new file and then delete it. Step 4. Add a new section. This is very similar to step 1, except you only have to add a couple measures, or a break, or a chorus, not an entire song. Just do something that is additive in nature. Step 5. Is your song at least as good as Q? Is it as awesome as you wanted it to be originally? Don't go easy on yourself. Don't settle. Really think if you've met the bar. If not, go to step 2. If you make it out of the steps without cheating, you have successfully created a song to an arbitrary quality metric. You are a winner! tl;dr while (song is not awesome) { take a break; delete the worst part of song; add a new part to song; }

The title reminds me of Vindkast - Groove Bias Resurrection: http://remix.thasauce.net/song/RTS0166/ I guess everybody is enjoying zircon's drum pack?

SolidComposer is project management. It's for the time between nothing and having a complete song. SoundCloud, Last.fm, Noctune are for getting exposure to your music. SolidComposer is going to add a "publish to SoundCloud" and possibly "publish to Noctune" if they want to work with us.

If somebody wants this for themselves or somebody else, feel free to hit me up. I'll use my l33t h4xz0rz to do the hard part if you do the commentary.

yeah I guess you're right - whoever the mods are, feel free to move it. My logic was "this relates to one hour competitions, therefore it goes in the competition area"

err, yeah... I usually skip the "Blood on your Penis" song. gross! haha

It has me talking but don't worry it's just to read off the themes to give the songs context. Enjoy! http://www.superjoesoftware.com/temp/flik-ohc.zip I love you, Flik.

Good point Zephyr - I should have added that to the Plans page. Every time you start a band, it is initialized with 500 MB of space. If you have any "extra space" in your account, you can freely give and take space from any band you are in. (You can only take what you've already given.) I'll add that information to the plans page. I will certainly look into advertising and stuff, especially since all the users of the site are obviously musicians and ads for synths, gear, etc would be effective.

To be honest I don't have any stakeholders. It's just me, trying to get it off the ground. I don't even have a co-founder yet. But! I decided to make the free plan more obvious, like you said. I also upped the amount of space you get for free and tripled the amount of space you get for paid plans. Oh, and JH not to worry, I'll get that edit competition button done soon. I gotta catch up on homework and my real job for a week, and then I'm back at it!

I think you could be right. On the other hand, while I absolutely want people to sign up for the free account and have fun, I want to at least give the suggestion that people sign up for the paid plans. If everybody went free, I'd be paying to keep this service alive out of my own pocket.

Check it out - http://solidcomposer.com/article/introducing-solidcomposer/