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)?
