Here are your Round 1 rankings from SpinTunes 5 and SpinTunes 25 Champion Travis Norris:
Travis's full reviews are coming soon; in the meantime, read on for some words from Travis about their judging philosophy and process.
Greetings Spintunas!
It is with regret that I must inform you even with the generous extra week I was not able to complete reviews on time. I have started them; I will finish them; hopefully by mid week, and then you can see all of my attempts to somehow quantify and sort the enormous amount of effort and talent that went into this round into a mathematical expression of value.
It’s been rough, folks, which is to say - good work.
That said I don’t want to give you just a page of numbers to attempt to decode as you beginning/continue work on your round 2 entries, so here are a few explanations as to how my judging philosophy and rankings work. I will try to keep this brief and hopefully not include too many confusing contradictions.
What is a “song”?
This is a songwriting contest, at least primarily, right, so it might help to explain what I think when I say a “song” is good in this context. I am not talking about the recording or the performance or the arrangement when I think of the the idea of a song. To me, a song is what can be communicated by a lead sheet. So that is:
The chord progression
The lyrics
The melody
In my opinion, if you don’t have these elements in place and if they don’t translate to another genre or arrangement, if they can’t survive a less than perfect technical performance, if they can’t actually be communicated to another person without a recording…
…you probably don’t have a good “song”.
Now I should say, this mostly applies to when I’m having a discussion about songwriting with songwriters. If I’m talking to some kind of civilian I might say that I love the song “Ares” by Covet, even though that is an instrumental full of virtuostic guitar playing where you might have some difficult even saying what the melody is for large sections of the song. The reason for this is that outside of the sphere we’re all working in if you get precious about the definition of a “song” in this way people think you’re being a pretentious dickhead alien, and they’re probably right. But as judging art is extremely subjective any guardrails and boundaries that can be put in place are helpful for me as judge, trying to actually qualify an of my opinions, and hopefully for you as a contestant, trying to understand how I actually got there.
Presentation still counts
So as much as I would love to judge solely the sort of platonic ideal of the song I haphazardly laid out above, that’s still a process fraught with likely inconsistency and bias, so the performance and the recording quality is going to factor into it. Think of your recording as a way of presesnting and selling the idea of your song, not necessarily a showcase for your musical talent (although obviously if you’ve got it, fire away).
What about the challenge?
I don’t really care.
WHAT? Isn’t that the whole point of this thing???
Yeah for some people I’m sure it is—ugh, okay, let me back up.
This is a position borne of 16 years (ugh, somebody fetch me my walking stick) of Spintunes, but as a competitor I have found that the challenges are best treated as a prompt that you should absolutely meet as squarely as you can but, the second you’ve done that – chase the good song. Meeting the challenge really well and producing a song that needs several pages of explanation to get a listener to understand why in the world you would choose to write a song like that is not what I’m here for, personally. The good news is, if you are, at least one of the judges probably has the complete opposite opinion on this matter that I do, so it should all come out in the (scoresheet) wash.
It has also been my personal experience that meeting the challenge well, even if I also score well, but ending up with a song I just don’t care much about outside the contest leaves me feeling a little cold. But you’re not me (....I don’t think), so, do what makes you happy.
So what does all that mean
Okay it means for this round I ranked the songs from 1st place to last (or said another way FORTY FOURTH oh my god my brain is overflowing trying to process all the beats and the melodies and the ideas again I am so sorry the reviews aren’t done, SORRY) (EXCEPTION: Challenge, see note below) in these categories, weighted accordingly:
Lyrics x7
Music x6
Challenge x5
Performance x3
Production x2
Slant x1
(Slant is basically a ranking of how much I personally liked, whether I found it to be more or less the sum of its parts, whether I am likely to listen to it again, genre bias, etc. That one is mostly there to be useful as a tie breaker )
For challenge, it was a 4 point (0 to 3) scale that went something like this:
3 = I was really engaged/impressed/otherwise enthused by your approach
2 = you met the challenge
1 = you met the challenge but I felt it might have been at the expense of a song that works outside the context of the challenge
0 = you did not meet the challenge that I could tell (only one song got this ranking, and if the other judges had moved to DQ I would have had no counterargument, but part of my devil may care approach to the challenge is assuming that in a broad challenge such as this you might have met the challenge and I’m just too stupid to see it)
So I took the rankings and the weightings above, plugged it all into a spreadsheet, sorted by total, and that was the ranking. In the event of ties I went down the list again and whoever “won” a category first won the tie. Or at least that’s how it would work if there was a tie. There weren’t any this round.
I think probably for round 2 I am going to change the scale for challenge to be a 5 or maybe even 10 point scale because I do admit that the song that failed the challenge still ranked pretty high, seeing as it only missed out on a total of 15 points, and that probably is taking me “I don’t care about the challenge” position a little too high.
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