Ready, set, dig!
The Crate Digger Death-match starts today. We’ve had some good online press over the end of the week and filled up all 12 spots with ease. The 12 entrants are Doctor Popular, TradeMark G., Tanner, Bomarr, nYgel, Antisocial, D-Form, DJ Snyder, Snake Eyes, Fernando Filgueira, Larry Legend, and Tyler Stickley.
Z. has sent out his last minute list of motifs, which was a short list of rules announced at the last minute to keep anyone from starting the project early. These rules included buying at least one item made in the 80s, having one song where the main sample is played backwards, and each album must have at least one country or disco song.
Whenever I would explain the contest to someone they seemed to love the idea, but not quite understand a certain part of it. For instance, when I would say $12 was the most you could spend on the items you sampled your music from, many folks didn’t understand that we weren’t counting the editing equipment (tape decks, record players, computers, etc) as part of that charge.
I think the press we’ve seen online has been great, it proves the story has “legs”, but it would be nice to get more print media or even do some interviews as well. I liked the blurb in Thursday’s S.F. Chronicle that referred to the event as a bit of MacGyver with a pinch of Iron Chef. All the blog coverage has been very positive, but it seems like people leaving comments either get the challenge or they don’t. I’m hoping that we can keep the press coming in and average 400 new unique visitors a day during the online judging phase. Hopefully this won’t only be a fun challenge for each producer, but may also gain them new audiences.
Personally, my plan for the CDD is to get my shopping done by 11am, then get home and start by noon. I haven’t picked out my thrift store yet, but I’ll probably stick with buying cds if possible. In terms of production, I see myself spending the first 3 hours sampling sounds and chopping up my drum kits, before I even start my first song. Ideally, I’d like to take a crack at several producing styles including very simple splicing and mixing together of verses and choruses, but mostly I’ll be creating totally new songs out of kits I create. Unfortunately, I’ll be missing Self Edge’s Super Future party unless I want to sacrifice a couple hours of production time.
January 5th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Whew, I’m done. That was intense. Brief breakdown of what I did:
3am - awoke disappointed that it hadn’t started yet.
4am - had a dream about stuff I could buy and it gave me some ideas
5am - awoke disappointed again.
6am - had another dream about it
7:45am - woke up and played some guitar hero.
8:15am - headed off to buy some energy drinks and then the thrift store
9am - thrift store opened.
9:45am - finished shopping.
10am - got back home and started sampling like crazy.
11:40am - got the bulk of the sampling done, thanks to my 2 computers working in tandem.
11:45am - one of my tapes broke, giving me some nice audio.
12pm - finished my first song - an atmospheric noise track to set the mood.
4:30pm - finished all my songs, so I went back and cleaned them up a little.
5:30pm - finished tagging all my mp3s and began uploading them.
6:23pm - finished uploading them and building a quick website.
http://antisocial.propagation.net/~mridlen/oldtoysandbrokentapes/
Overall, I think the $12 dollar limit was overkill for me. I could have made an album using only 1 CD for source material. I feel very drained. I don’t think that I will probably win, but I am fairly satisfied with the results. Fun times, to say the least.
January 6th, 2008 at 1:14 am
Of all the possible problems I foresaw this evening, my power chord frying two hours before the end of my 12 hour period was not one of them.
I was hoping I could try to finish my album, but as my battery was running out of juice I didn’t end have time to convert the three finished .wavs to .mp3s and get them on my server.
The battery gave out during the first songs transfer, so I’ve got nothing online and nothing saved anywhere but on my computer. I’m obviously bummed, but theres nothing I can do. Anyways, my girlfriend still has a working computer, so I can’t wait to listen to your guys tracks and I hope we get some decent traffic this week.
I’ll let you guys know when I get the three finished songs up, but I’m not sure when my power chord problem will be fixed.
January 6th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Oh man that’s sad. From the sound if it, though, you weren’t the only one who had technical difficulties. I’m definitely looking forward to hearing your mp3s.
January 6th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Here’s a small account of my day and the songs that somehow happened. It was very challenging but it opened my mind up to a lot of things. I didn’t have technical difficulties compared to the others.
Check out the Death Match Album
http://thisisthescore.blogspot.com/
January 7th, 2008 at 11:55 am
My album is also online with details.
Check it out http://www.DrownRadio.com/codfresh.