We are making a production/library album of music to underscore our weekly Sunday vlog. This will be an opportunity for you to hone your compositional skills, work to a brief, with an unusual ensemble of players and an even more unusual set of tools to make them with.
For those interested, we would like you to create a single piece of music as part of a challenge where we have a new novel way of totally levelling the playing field so we all get to hear how our composer chops are shaping up, not just how good or experienced you are at using computers to make music. In this way, we make things as fair as possible to all.
EVERYONE, with no exception is going to be using the exact same sound-set to make their submissions and ALL submissions must be accompanied by a MIDI file that matches the audio sent. You will be judged purely on the quality of the composition, how you have arranged it for the band, the idea behind it and the spirit in which you have written it. All we need from you is an audio file of your composition and a MIDI file we can check it against and we will guide you through the entire process.
For 8 chosen winners, you will have a live band record your track 100% acoustically. We will be streaming live the sessions and everyone who has tracks being recorded will have the opportunity to produce and work with the musicians via this stream. For one winner however, we will pay for you to travel here to Scotland to attend the session in-person.
The 8 winning names will be placed in a hat, we will chose one at random who will get to attend their session in person. Wherever you are in the world. Accommodation, expenses and all travel costs paid.
One final question regarding the Decent Sampler version (thanks for making it Ed) , the drums are set up like an instrument rather than drum part so the sounds only last while the key is depressed - do you know if that is the same on the Kontakt version?
It means to get a cymbol crash or ride sound like it’s not being choked we have to play a really long note which isn’t the usual way for MIDI drum parts.
It looks like Decent Sampler doesn’t have “One Shot” trigger type, but setting the release to a big number like 100 seems to have the desired effect. Just not sure if we can do that, or if we have to program long notes to match Kontakt?
e.g. Summer Challenge _26 - drums.dspreset edit the ADSR to be something more like this:
groups attack=“0.000” attackCurve=“0” decay=“0.500” release=“100” sustain=“1.000”
The cymbals in the Kontakt version of the drum instrument work in the same way as the DS port (I’ve checked in Kontakt Player v7 and v8).
For the purposes of the challenge I suspect it doesn’t really matter if you edit the envelope in the way you’ve described (my understanding is that entries will be judged on the audio render, then validated against the MIDI if shortlisted/selected, and a change like this wouldn’t materially impact the composition) - however, this is just my instinct; I’m not an authority. It depends how closely the MIDI version needs to play back to match the audio in the judging scenario - for a perfect match, I guess you’d need to use the envelopes as provided.
Hi! THANK YOU SO MUCH for creating such a great challenge! Learning a lot!
I’ve been writing using scoring software which will then be uploaded to my DAW using the level playing field sound library you provided. Along with the notes, the score contains other information including written dynamics, articulations, phrasing marks, key signatures and meter changes. When uploading the final midi project on TCHC website, do you want everything, or just the midi notes? If it’s just the notes, should we include a score (pdf or musicXML)?
Hey, I had so much fun during this challenge, wish you all the best!
Was I supposed to get some sort of confirmation that my submission went through? It’s my first time doing something like this, and I got a little paranoid after clicking submit.
Once you have uploaded your submission you receive this message: “Thank you for your submission!”, then the submission form is “closed”, in other words you can no longer access to the “name” field or the “drag your zip file here” area etc… I completely understand that feeling of paranoia when it comes to clicking submit! I put it off for about three weeks before clicking…
Hi, all. My first CH Composer Challenge and I’d value advice:
a) Christian has - a couple of times - talked about orchestral players not liking to do what’s called “voice crossing” ie, a lower instrument climbing above a normally higher one and vice versa. But I’ve got duets in my piece and the lines need to weave in and out. It’s usual in all music. But I don’t want to be ruled out. Any thoughts?
b) I’ve left the arrangement for these uncomfortable samples till last. I shan’t use effects, but what about level and tempo automation? Is it okay?
On a), it’s my recollection that in one of the early CYHMN episodes where this challenge was discussed [EDIT - it was here], Christian said something about being interested to hear the results of unconventional composition (or something along those lines), and gave voice-crossing as an example. So that (hopefully) won’t rule you out.
I think the answer to b) is “it depends”. To be absolutely inside the terms of the challenge, my interpretation is that you should only use automation that can be represented in a MIDI file.
On this basis, tempo automation is definitely fine, since this is natively supported in a MIDI file.
Volume automation is likely to be riskier - although the MIDI standard supports volume automation (via CC 007) the challenge sample packs don’t directly implement support for volume automation via that - or any other - CC. So to to automate volume you’d have to use DAW automation, which won’t appear in your rendered MIDI file. Which, if you use it, might rule you out - we don’t know for sure.
Thanks, Mr Ed Lyrer. I was hoping you might have some ideas and these have been tremendously helpful and instructive.
a) I’ve gone ahead with voice crossing. I’m grateful for the exact reference.
b) Tempo automation has been applied. And, in the end, I used rudimentary velocity automation which seemed to survive rendering out as a MIDI file and loading back into my DAW. The piece sounds terrible and I’ll probably avoid listening to it ever again in that form! I’ll mix it with better sample libraries, though.
As far as I am aware no specific information about when the results will be announced has been given, beyond what challenge page says - that the results will be given “live on the Crow Hill workshop” (no date specified).
(Shortly after the challenge started, I think I remember that Christian mentioned that the challenge recording session would hopefully take place in September; if that still holds then the results are likely to come out in the next couple of weeks. However, Pianobook shows ~1.2k downloads of the challenge sample pack; if even half of those downloads were made into entries, that’s a lot of judging to get through!)
Going by Ed’s reasonable calculation, approx. 1:100 chance .
I’ve just left The Sync Opps after a year of subscribing. They send briefs via Patreon. However, on enquiring, I learned that there are 30-40 entries on average for each one, out of which a few will be chosen, I suppose, to be forwarded to the client. And I note the number of actual placements is tiny.
Open briefs are hard.
I can elaborate on the pros and cons of The Sync Opps if anyone here needs to know.
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. Looking forward to the live recordings