sgx

I thought it was curious I hadn't seen anything about this yet. I might go....I might also be in the middle of moving that weekend though.

edit: Heh, I guess I should read the whole thread before interjecting...this subject did come up...oh well. What do you guys think about "games" as art? Not particularly videogames, but the actual construction of a set of rules for someone to follow in order to play a game. Examples would be....making a new game to play with a deck of cards, the game of tag kids play on the playground, modifying Halo game rules in Halo 3's Forge, etc. Obviously videogames are a medium that is constructed with various other art forms, but are the actual interactivity and rulesets provided part of the art? This is the major new addition that the medium is bringing. If one said the purpose of art is to elicit reactions, emotions, feelings from the 'viewer' or person experiencing the piece of art, then I think that gameplay/interactivity is possibly a legitimate art form or part of art. How do you feel when you are winning, or losing, or you make a good move, or you are worried about a particular situation, or excited about a strategy you have cooked up. Games are engaging because of the emotional changes and ups and downs we go through as we play, and those are very much only possible because of the way the designer constructed the rules. The designer has to consider heavily the way that humans feel when certain things happen and set up rules and environments that are conducive to creating certain feelings and eliminating others in the person experiencing the game.

What a wonderful night of being stressed out. Thanks for votes!

That is very, very close to the "if I win" thing you were condemning. You are paying someone to do something they normally wouldn't in order to win a contest.

I just posted this on my Ourstage blog: Reading some of the posts in here made me think more about the "deal" I had made for the votes. While I'm still pretty gray on what I think about it, I don't want to do that anymore, and I hope it won't influence the competition any further for me. I already won once...I don't need to win again under possibly shady circumstances.

Somehow Lori Cunningham (artist with the track I jumped ahead of at the last minute in the techno channel) knows about OCR. We've been exposed! ohnoes.

Well, I also like money, of course. I have free downloads of about half my original material available on my site. If I win a large chunk of money from Ourstage, then I feel like I've earned enough via music for the time being and like to give it away. Is there something wrong with that?

Hey, hey, You won half a grand prize didnt'cha? And I gave you a reprieve from SGX competition last month!

Wow...I was in 2nd all day in techno with jewbei right behind (nice track, btw man) and the Lori track in 1st. Didn't think it would change. Changed....I won that channel. Also won with But Underneath All That in experimental. Noice.

Pretty sure you probably wanted to put "SGX" in for "popular artist." Popular is a relative term - I dunno how 'popular' I am but, yeah I have fans out there that will do stuff if I ask them to. I didn't get them by showing up with shitty music a month ago. I've been making music for 7 years and have worked pretty hard having a website and constant online presence the whole time. I haven't had any lucky breaks or handy connections - its me making good music and working to cultivate the fans. Part of the ourstage game is how well you can move your fans to the site and have them vote. If they wanted it to be a true judge of the songs involved, it would be a blind competition - they'd just play the song and not have an image or credit and ask you to rate. And as Audix said, it is very hard to affect anything before the quarter-finals, so the top 20 at least are there legitamately.

Zircon and Audix both offered free copies of CDs to random folks who voted for them. Are they off the hook? Ourstage sends newsletters occasionally suggesting ways for artists to get people to vote for them (and not just to vote in general). If getting people on the site to just vote for you is gaming the system, well, those who created and administer the game want you to play it like that. It is obvious they know that their system doesn't so much judge quality of songs, but is still in big part a popularity contest. They want more users on the site for the advertising. I LIKE giving away my music for free. Last time I won, the amount of albums downloaded at their current prices was roughly equivalent to the $5,000 I won. Obviously not everyone who grabbed the free albums would have paid for it but doing that has mostly killed my sales since then. And I give it to anyone, not just those who voted. Almost everybody who is going to Ourstage specifically to vote for me already has my albums - I'm mining the same audiences that 1)Probably already bought stuff if they wanted it and 2)Already grabbed free stuff two months ago.

Hey guys, if I win one of my two channels, I'll make my album Chroma available for free download for a day. If I win both channels, I'll make all of my albums available free download for a day. If I win grand prize, I'll make all of my albums available for free download for a week. Vote for me! WOo!

Lets rock this shit this month!!!

Yeah, this is mostly lots of heavy/messy compression and possibly some distortion. If you have Reason, the Tape Distortion setting on the Scream unit is really good for this. VST's that are good are blockfish and Camelphat/Camelcrunch. Look for stuff that purports to be analog style. Compressors that are transparent won't do this as well. I wish I had Scream in VST! The last song I did, "But Underneath All That" has drums sort of like this.

Spore looks kinda cool, but I'm sort of turned off by the fact that almost all creatures I've seen created with it are some sort of googly-eyed retarded monsters. I haven't seen much ability to make cool stuff...just abominations of nature. Which I suppose is fun too.

I had to see what other people did with this song. I'm digging it. The beginning was nice, but it felt really unconnected to the rest. Maybe you can work on the transition. The bells were ok, but I felt like something drastic might be needed to be done to them. Like some heavy distortion, or unison with a synth or something to make that melody stand out. I actually had problems with the bells in our remix (sephfire did the arrangement, but somehow he's got this remixing quirk where he likes to leave out the main melodies....so I made sure to put that in). Any synths or bells I was using sounded lame, so I actually just sampled the original song. I did some EQing and whatnot to get as much of the other instrument sounds from the original out of the audio snippet and put some distortion on.

I'm gonna get up at 630 in the morning and try to pick up one of the MGS4 80gb PS3's at walmart and get that $100 gift card. I don't really want a PS3 RIGHT NOW, but I want one sometime and this is a good deal.

Wow - blast from 1.5 years in the past . I thought it wasn't going to be posted! Hope you guys like.

Hopefully in that getting to the quarterfinals is kind of hit or miss and you can't much influence by asking for votes because there are so many entries it takes a lot of voting for other people until you get to your song once in a while. I'm pretty sure a lot of us would do well, but not as well without support from OCR and other places voting for us. So, I'll be asking for votes again, assuming I get into quarters.

Nice job guys. I voted as much as I could tonight. I've entered in for June in three channels (techno, electronic, and experimental). Hopefully I'll be begging for votes a month from now.

Voting...this is the easy and fast round... Audix - I know how you could win with Deep Impact. Get this photo and use it as the song image. You never actually say that it IS you, so its cool. It's people's fault for assuming

I could totally go for some K-Bups right now.

Ok that clip wasn't that interesting but, SHIT YES! Happy days! BGaE 2!

Is that left-over anger from that thread he made 5 years ago making fun of all the high posters?

You need to add the "men shouting 'hey' every two beats" loop to Rising Impact and then you will be a sure-fire win.