Composition Challenge #6 - Voting

Antique_Guitars

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.

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(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.
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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

TTony

Wow. It's Saturday already ??

Some epics in that playlist ...

Alnico

1st place vote.

@Fretwired - 'Blighty One' 

Totally Brilliant ! 

The Narration at the beginning in the first movement is read perfectly to reflect the mood of the song.

The Pink Floyd References were amazing, however none of it is remotely Plagiarist but clearly influenced by 70's Pink Floyd.

I love the 3 movements at 0:50 and again at 2:30, the third movement really underpinning the title 'Blighty' and the British Attitude to such horrific experiences.

2nd place vote.

@SteamAbacus - I really enjoyed 'Pushing through the mud'.

It has a very definite feel to it which without narration or any other direction, really captures the desperate feeling of what the title is trying to convey. Very good playing and the simple but effective backing track / bass line draws the attention to the guitar which speaks very well indeed. I was put slightly in mind of David Gilmour in terms of feel and mood to the music, maybe somewhere between 'On an Island' and 'Sorrow'. Excellent, effective and evocative piece of music.

3rd place vote.

@TTony - 'The Rank Stench'

This is really interesting because the repetitive vocal throughout actually embeds itself into the 'Feel' of the music around halfway through and it's not until then that the meaning behind it becomes clear...............

It's as if the line is being spoken over and over again by one of the soldiers, so permanently traumatised by what his senses have been assaulted with, he's muttering to himself and walking in a daze, broken and disjointed in places, possibly decades later. The emotive aspect of this works on every level, Tony has almost recorded a 'Flashback'. While the music is quite simple in it's structure, it's very effective and fitting for the sombre subject, drawing attention away from the actual melody and focusing on that melancholic, staggering, anxious description of what a Flashback might feel like for someone who saw those horrors.

It was very difficult to pick favourites between these three stand out tracks.

 

I would like to say thank you to all of you for giving me some much needed inspiration when trying to approach these challenges.

Marvelous. 

Fretwired

@Alnico .. thanks for your kind words. The whole thing was done in an afternoon, although I had it all planned out in my head (rare for me). I like the poem and thought the first few verses would be an excellent intro ending on the authors hope that a friend might be slightly wounded and shipped back home, which in soldiers slang is a Blighty one. My grandfather was a sergeant in the 1st Battalion South Staffordshire regiment and served in France, Italy and Palestine. I used to go and see him in the early 70s when I was a Floyd nut so I associate trips to the Black Country and chats with him with Floyd - he died in 1977. He told me that his commanding officer used to refer to going over the top as going for a 'jolly cup of tea' hence the bit at the end which was taken from a longer song written by Roy Wood who was from the same area in the Midlands as my granddad. I've always wondered whether Roy had a relative in the South Staffs and wrote it as a homage. Maybe it was slang that was more widely used.

There are some excellent tracks .. I immediately liked @Nomad and @SteamAbacas but I will listen to the others again.

Top work everybody.

steamabacus

I've had a first listen through and it's a tough one to call. I'll need a couple more listens to separate them but every one's a winner, really. Good work, chaps.

@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.

Alnico

@SteamAbacus

@Antique_Guitars

Forgive me i hadn't realised that the new voting system was in place this month, i misread that to think it was starting with Challenge #7 in March.

I will amend my post above to keep some continuity and make the vote counting easier.

Thanks for the heads up.

Chuffola

@Fretwired in 1st for me.

@SteamAbacus 2nd and 3rd is a difficult choice but I've gone for @TTony

Well done all. Must get my arse in gear for the next one!

thecolourbox

I shall be listening properly to these this evening, I'm very much looking forward to it i must say

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.

samzadgan

thecolourbox said:

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.

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...

TTony

The votes are in from the TT jury

1st place;  @Fretwired

Another brilliant submission from Mr FW.  Liked the use of the narrative (well, I would, I used it myself!).  The playing is excellent as usual, and fitting to the subject matter - slow, quiet, reflective, sad.  Production sounds spot-on through my PC speakers too.  Fits even better when I read the background/thinking behind it too.

2nd place;  @Nomad

Sombre, melancholic, puts me in mind of funerals.  Fitting.

3rd place;  @TheColourBox

I get marching, discordants & chanting, which push this one into 3rd for me, in front of the others ...

The @SteamAbacus track was a fine piece of music to my ears, but I wasn't really sure of the correlation between the music (other than the title) and the subject matter.  The music seemed too upbeat and cheerful.  ?

@SamZadgan - if only there had been some sort of vocal track or narrative to your epic!  I can associate the distorted riff with the distorted reality of trench warfare though.

Explanation of mine ...

Firstly, (again) I didn't spend the time on it that I wanted/intended to.  I got the core strings riff and sound whilst on a train pre-Xmas, just from doodling around in GB, but ended up throwing the rest together on the afternoon of the submission.  It's intended to be repetitive, hopeless, depressing, almost drone-y with an abrupt and unforeseen end (for obvious reasons!).  Grabbed the voice from the YT clip and edited that into a couple of samples for playing over the background.

All done in GarageBand on the iPad, no guitars were harmed in the making of this piece!  First time I've really played with samples too - so I've learned something (however small) from the process.

thecolourbox

TTony;484503" said:

with an abrupt and unforeseen end (for obvious reasons!).

Ooh yes that too, i also went for that too for the comparatively sudden end of the war but also because i ran out of time because i wanted to go to bed . This is definitely the most epic of the challenges so far, lots of symbolism and such this time around, very thoughtful pieces

steamabacus

Right, I've listened through again and I think I've decided on my votes - I really hope I don't change my mind before I get to the end of typing this as any one of these could have been top. I've ended up relying on 'gut feeling', which ones spoke more to something inside me.

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.

daveww

Well done to everyone that entered.  Sadly I missed this one.  I did have an early idea but everything I did with it seemed too cheesy and I ran out of time.  Voting pretty subjective and not an easy decision.

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.

thecolourbox

My votes are as follows: 

 5 points to @nomad

Beautifully sad and uncertain, some really nice suspended notes held just that little bit longer than you'd expect give it a bold but still slightly cautious course, fitting the theme wonderfully. Beautiful reverb

3points to @samzagdan

Great tones and great playing, I liked that there were almost like three distinct movements, the Middle being slow and like chiming bells

1 point to @fretwired

The tea bit, followed by the explosion....just brilliant

Well done everyone, Nomad was my clear favourite but I could have picked any of the others as my second and third placed pieces.

Thank you also to folks for your kind comments about mine

Fretwired

My votes based on the brief ....

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.

samzadgan

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.

hobbio

I will listen and vote after my show tonight.

hobbio

Update: I will listen and vote after the 24th, I'll have time to do it properly then.

Lev

1 @Steamabacus - 5 points

2 @TTony - 3 points

3 @fretwired - 1 point

Well done to everyone, very high quality entries again in what for me was a really difficult challenge.

Antique_Guitars

get voting people!

thecolourbox

Otherwise I shall log in as thebolourcox and cast all my votes for myself