hey guys how's it goin

CODENAME: CHIPS CACAOPHONY

Welcome to the signups for the CHIPS CACAOPHONY, a goofy, anonymized, multi-round music competition to test your mettle as a composer!

To sign up, post here saying you’re interested. It’d also be nice of you to sign up here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_DQnh_iB5KPB_7NlKFeyJCIOyjYpIrzFfUmB_rf_sqs/edit

ROUNDS

Your goal in the CACAOPHONY is to write amazing music, qualify into the final round, and win!

The way that you qualify is to submit songs that score over 100 points in the QUALIFICATION ROUNDS.

In the qualifications rounds, you’ll write a song. Once the deadline is up, everyone will listen and vote on everyone’s songs. I will announce the results after the deadline is over, and the top 15 or so scorers will receive points based on how well they did.

You do not need to participate in every round! If you’re busy, or need a break, you can skip out without penalty.

ROUND TYPES

There are two types of rounds:

1. NORMAL rounds. Weekend to weekend rounds where you write any unique piece of music. These give the majority of your points and will be the meat and potatoes of the Cacaophony.

2. BONUS rounds. These will be short (5 or less days) and will require you to write music with weird rules. For example, maybe you'll have to write a piece that's the same forwards and backwards, or a piece that only uses white noise for percussion, or maybe something totally different! The actual rules won't be announced until the start of the bonus round. 

SCHEDULE

Main Round 1 (3/3 - 3/11)

Bonus Round! (3/12 - 3/16)

Main Round 2 (3/17 - 3/25)

Bonus Round! 2 (3/26 - 3/30)

Qualification round 3 (3/31 - 4/8)

Bonus Round! 3 (4/9 - 4/13)

Final (Bonus) Round (4/16-4/19)

FINAL ROUND (4/12-5/5) (two weeks!)

Points will be distributed like so:

1: 100 points

2: 90 points

3: 80 points

4: 70 points

5: 60 points

6: 50 points

7: 40 points

8: 30 points

9: 20 points

10: 10 points

11-15: 25 points

Bonus round scores will receive half points.

ANONYMITY

All songs will be anonymous until judging is over. This is to ensure judging fairness.

JUDGING

Everyone who enters a song in a round will be required to vote on 20 of the songs in that round. All votes will be made public at the end of the round. Failing to vote will be a -20 point penalty (of course, you will not go into negatives on any round).

On top of community voting, a panel of judges will vote on all tracks. Their votes will be 3x as strong as community votes.

REWARDS

I might send the winner some cacao beans or something. As usual for me, the reward of these contests is the joy in participating!

MINUTIAE

All songs must be original! You may not have started on a song before the contest begins. That will get you permanently banned from the contest, and all future cacophonies.

You may enter as a team of 2.

All compositional, arrangement and production work must be done by you and your teammate. However, you may ask other people to play instrument parts or sing.

You may only submit one track per round. It’s also okay if you skip a round! If you already have over 100 points, you can sit back and relax, if you’d like. ;-)

Hello everyone! I'm hosting CHIPS COMPO, the weeklong contest with anonymous submissions and user judging, where you make a song based on a theme from scratch, and the SEVENTH one just started!

Here's the competition page.

Here's our discord. (Seriously, come hang out with us, even if you don't want to compete! It's fun.)

If you like writing music, are interested in competitions, or have several thousand followers and are a popular combustion-related newgrounds music personality who just followed me, maybe you should check it out! No matter which (if any) of those oddly specific categories you may happen to fall into, I assure you we'd love to have you.

First things first, whenever you're taking musical advice from someone, ALWAYS listen to their music to see if it's any good. If you like the mixes in my songs (try http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/754531) then use my guide, otherwise don't! I freely admit I have a long way to go, though I feel my mixes have the basics in place.

Anyway.

HOW 2 MIX, sorted by importance.

Remove limiters.

If you're using FL Studio, for gods sake, remove any limiter on your master mixer channel. When learning, never put a limiter on master. This makes it impossible to mix when stuff starts hitting the limiter's threshold.

Are your songs clipping?

Clipping is the sound of distortion that happens when your songs go too high into the red on the volume meter. If you don't recognize clipping immediately, I'd advise you to always keep your master volume meter in the green until you do.

"My tracks sound muddy!"

This is because of TOO MUCH REVERB. There's a lot of misinformation about this that if you just do random EQ cuts or something all the mud will go away. No no no. If your song sounds muddy, step 1: TURN OFF EVERY REVERB AND DELAY. "Wow, it sounds crisp now!" (If it doesn't, you missed some reverbs. Check in your VSTs, they often have built-in reverb and delay modules.) Yeah, I know, it's amazing.

"But now it's a little dry." Put a SMALL amount of reverb on ONE instrument. Put some SMALL delay on your leads. Add it back gradually, and constantly check your mix for mud as you do so, turning it back when it's too muddy. You should now have a better, non muddy mix.

I think what happens is that to an amateur, each of their 6 instruments with reverb sounds great soloed, so they join them all together, not realizing that the reverbs will also combine. That's how you get mud.

Put a high pass filter on every non-bass instrument.

The quantity of frequencies in your song should look like an inverted pyramid. Tons of reverb tails and delay on top, a few mid range instruments, and ONE SINGLE BASS INSTRUMENT. If you have multiple things in your bass, they will make the low end sound muddy.

"But I don't have tons of stuff in my bass" This is where I'm going to surprise you. Almost every instrument has bass frequencies. Put a spectrum analyzer on your different instruments and test them out. Yep. Better safe than sorry. Always put a high pass to trim off those redundant frequencies that muddy up your low end!

Side chain your bass to your kick so that they don't overlap.

Learn how to sidechain in your DAW. The idea is you want the bass to get quiet when the kick hits, then be loud when the kick is not hitting. If you don't do this, your kick won't be audible in your song.

Take care with your volumes.

80% of mixing is getting volume levels to be right. For some reason, everyone is obsessed with EQ. NO NO NO. EQ is helpful, but, aside from the bass high pass I just mentioned, VOLUME should always be your first go to.

How to make good volume decisions:

Keep practicing, you'll eventually be able to do this in your sleep. Until that point, there's a trick: make all mixing decisions with the volume turned down low. The brain can make better mixing decisions when a track is very quiet.

Make your drums louder.

If you're reading this guide, you got the levels of your drums wrong. Sorry, but it happens to every amateur musician for years.

90% of people who do drums wrong get them too quiet. Compress them, MAKE THEM LOUDER. (The remaining 10% are weirdos who somehow made them too loud.)

Don't have overlapping frequencies.

Imagine that your song has a couple of slots:

•    bass

•    midbass

•    midrange (melody/singing)

•    midrange pads

•    high range (high arps, or sometimes nothing).

If you put one instrument in each slot, the song will sound full. (Assuming you didn't make any of the above errors)

If you put more than one instrument in the same slot, they will fight with each other and make each other inaudible. 

My bass doesn't sound... basey enough

USE SUB BASS. 

High pass your bass instrument. Now, put a sine wave under it, playing the note that your bass instrument played. A sine wave is like the ultimate bass note, it's tough for anything to sound as big. 

When done correctly, it will sound like your bass instrument is huge and super basey. (If it doesn't, you probably need to high pass some other instruments that are interfering with the bass, like I said above.)

Panning/Stereo Width

"But I wanna have two things in the same slot! I WANNA!"

There's really only two things you can do. First, you can pan - put one thing left and one thing right. This can work, but it can also make people go insane if you have two melodies going at the same or something. (Not that I would ever do that...)

It's generally a good idea to be aware of panning, though. Panning e.g. hihats alternatively left and right can help fill out a mix.

The other trick is stereo width. When you have a melody and a pad, and they're both at the same frequency, you're going to have some clashes. One cool trick is to adjust the stereo width of the pad to spread it out. (You can do this with the width parameter of Utility in Ableton - not sure about other DAWs). This will have the weird feeling of panning it both left and right simultaneously. It makes it sound wider, but with space in the center for something else.

It's hard to explain, but it's a great way to mix something like a pad with something like a melody. I did it in this song http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/622648 - see around 1:20 where the stabs and the melody are going at the same time, but not clashing somehow.

How to improve

Always always always ALWAYS be listening to other people's mixes. Compare your mix to the mix of other songs. Is it as good? Is it lacking in some way? What are they doing better? 

☂

I break it down into 4 categories, which I score out of 4:

• Mixing: How well the song is mixed. How well each instrument stands out. Hopefully there are no instruments with overlapping frequency ranges. Is the mix full when it should be? Do the drums provide a good backbone, if there are any?
• Composition: The melodies and chord progressions. How good are they?
• Arrangement: Does the song keep my attention? Or is it too repetitive? Does it change and evolve? Do the energy levels change over time?
• Sound Design/Sound Quality: how good/realistic do the sounds that you are using sound? 

My overall score for your song has nothing to do with these mini-scores. All it has to do with is how good I think the song is. I provide the mini-scores as a way for you to know what to improve.

Q&A:

• How can I improve my mix? Read this. Additionally, if your song sounds too muddy, you have too much reverb. 
• How can I improve my composition? Learn how to play an instrument (ideally piano), then play along to the songs that you like. Especially try to break down the stuff you're not familiar with, like weird progressions or fast melodies.
• How can I improve my arrangement? Er, I don't have a guide on this yet, sorry. Change stuff up every 4 bars - add/remove elements, and try including B/C sections as well. Also try modulating. Arrangement is probably the easiest of these 4 to get down as long as you vary stuff every 4 bars.
• How can I improve my sound design? I also dont have a guide on this either. It's actually "easy" though - listen to your favorite songs and pay very close attention to the types of sounds they use. Make a habit of this; do it every time you listen to music. Try to recreate similar sounding sounds. 

Hopefully that helps! Good luck, everyone! 

Hello everyone! I'm hosting CHIPS COMPO, the contest with anonymous judging where you make a song based on a theme in a week from scratch, and the second one just started!

Link to the website, with the theme.

Hang out in discord and chat! Seriously, come hang out with us! We have lots of fun and do extra compos and stuff.

* How to submit: Do it right on the website.
* Start: RIGHT NOW.
* End: Look at the countdown on the website. Seriously. It's easier than me posting some deadline on here.
* Theme: THE RIVER. But seriously, look at the website for pretty pictures and stuff.

In Chips Compo, YOU MUST VOTE. If you do not vote on other pieces, you will be disqualified and not receive the score on your own piece. No one wants that. :(

Hello everyone! I'm hosting NGCHIPS, a week long, themed, anonymous music competition, and the first one just started!

If you like making music, feel free to join!

The thread about it on Newgrounds is here.

The website with the theme and information is here.

Come hang out with us in Discord here!

If you follow me on here please follow me on Soundcloud as well: 

SOUNDCLOUD LINK HERE!

thank u

if i get more than 200 follower they send me a candy in the mails.

I'm writing little pieces to accompany a dungeons and dragons homebrew campaign that I am telling. 

These tracks were all inspired by improvisations, and are only barely fleshed out. They are meant more for background listening than rapt attention. Stil, I like a lot of them, and maybe you will too!

https://johnfn.bandcamp.com/album/johnfn-dragons

I expect this will update often, but who knows?

I was digging through some old mp3 renders when I found this, which eventually turned into a certain other song I wrote a while back:

https://instaud.io/jXS

This was an insanely rough cut I wrote in a few hours. Still I was taken aback because there were a lot of beautiful ideas in there that I later cut out. I really need to use my pickup more, whoa.