We recently had the channel's first ever composing competition
and I listened to 832 submissions, which was about 10 times the amount I was expecting.
I've entered a few competitions in the past but this is the first time I ever hosted one,
and so as submissions were coming in over the month of April I learned
things from both sides about what makes a strong entry.
So in this video I'll share some lessons I learned about hosting a competition,
what made some tracks stand out over others, and the things that made me not choose a track,
including the number one thing that made me most likely to reject it.
In the case of this competition, every single submission had to go through one person: me.
And so I think the first lesson is to know your audience.
I'm a film composer and if you've watched any of my videos you probably know I like
composers like John Williams or John Powell or Joe Hisaishi.
If your track was in the cinematic orchestral palette you already had a head start.
But you may not know that I also love Jon Brion
and They Might Be Giants and spent most of middle school obsessed with Weird Al.
Someone on the feedback form complained that I only picked the finalists based
on how quirky they were and that's really a complete misunderstanding.
I picked things that I liked and that suited my taste
and in some cases the quirkier music was my kind of thing.
So you obviously can't always know exactly who's going to be listening to your music
but try to be conscious of who's hosting the competition.
For example if it's being hosted by Native Instruments and it's celebrating a new
release of Massive or something, they probably want something synth-based.
If I'm hosting and you send in something atonal I'll probably pass.
It's not that there's anything wrong with it compositionally
(well, we'll see what they say in the comments) but it doesn't suit
my taste so I'm probably not going to choose it for my competition.
A lot of tracks were really well produced and really well written but not a lot happened.
They felt like they would be really good underscore to some other foreground element.
So the next lesson would be to know the venue.
Yes there was a photo for inspiration but the music
had to pretty much still function on its own.
A bunch of submissions were these really nice moody ambiences,
but the live stream was everyone sitting around listening really intently to the music.
A moody atmosphere just didn't feel as exciting or
interesting as something with a lot more development.
There was also only 90 seconds to tell your story with the music
which was not a lot of time for a long drawn-out slow introduction.
And this is not just me!
I did choose a few finalists that I think held a pretty consistent mood
or vibe for the whole track, but if you listen back to the winners
it's pretty clear the judges preferred tracks that had a lot of music fit into those 90 seconds.
This does not mean you need to be crazy and constantly changing.
It just means make sure you're keeping things interesting and engaging the whole time.
I'll come back to this point later.
One of the less expected lessons was that when you submit matters.
The longer you wait of course the more time you have to work on and perfect your track,
but I did listen to the submissions in the order they came in.
So after listening to 10 tracks, if number 11 was really strong and stood out
it would probably go into my keep folder.
But after listening to 800 tracks it became a lot harder for something to stand out.
One solution to that could be to wait until all the submissions were in and listen to them
in random order, but then we would need more time between the deadline and the live stream.
Or I could reduce the number of tracks that I listen to by
having somebody else triage them first.
Neither of those solutions I really like and so for the next one I'll probably
still do the same thing where I listen to the tracks in the order they come in.
So keep that in mind.
I think the sweet spot was somewhere around week three,
where I had a pretty good idea of what made a strong candidate, I had a few personal favorites,
but there was still plenty of room for more things to come in and stand out.
Also I don't want to over emphasize this point.
Two of the finalists actually came in in the last 48 hours,
but it is true that every time I went through my folder and decided what to keep and what to let
go of the things that I was familiar with and had grown to like were more likely to stick around.
So the reality is that the tracks that came in earlier had a slight unfair advantage in
that way, even though the composers who came in later had more time to work on their music.
One of the criteria for judging the competition was production value,
which for some people was a bit of a controversial point.
The argument was that the people who paid the most money for the
best sample libraries were basically just buying their way to the top.
I somewhat disagree with this for a few reasons.
First of all, free sample libraries exist,
as do free DAWs and notation software and plugins and so on.
But as a bigger point, production value is a necessary part of what we do.
Let's say you put out a call for a script and two writers of roughly equal skill apply.
The first one sends you a script as a text file.
The second one sends you a video of Brad Pitt in full
costume and full setting performing the scene.
If they're kind of the same script, which one do you think is going to leave a better impression?
Occasionally I release tech or synth related videos on my channel and they almost always do
pretty badly, which partly is just I should respond to that
feedback that that's not what my audience wants.
But it also worries me a bit because in 2022 production value is really important.
So as a first piece of advice: if you have a sound that sounds bad don't use it.
If you only have the Musescore default sound bank,
maybe you shouldn't be writing for a symphonic orchestra.
Instead write for the instruments you have that sound good.
Maybe you're just gonna have to write a solo piano piece
or something synth-based like a few of the finalists did.
But either way, in a competition where you know production value is being considered, submitting
something that doesn't sound pretty good feels like trying out for a sport with a blindfold on.
I wasn't looking for perfect production or 100
real sounding instruments, that was just one consideration.
There was actually something much more likely to make me pass on the track and that was being
boring.
Predictability was the ultimate track killer.
Now there is a fine line between being too repetitive on one side
and being so un-repetitive that it's incomprehensible on the other.
But if I got to a point where I was 30 seconds into a track
and I could predict what the next eight bars of music were gonna be it was generally a letdown.
As a general idea I lean towards using more repetition,
it's just when nothing changes that it becomes a problem.
A major part of composition is setting up expectations and then either giving us what
you've set us up to expect or surprising us by giving us something different.
But there's a balance.
If you never set up any expectations there's nothing really for us to follow, we lose interest.
If you always set up expectations and deliver them
exactly where we think they're going to go, we also kind of don't have any reason to listen.
The number one culprit of being predictable was looping chord
progressions, which tend to work really well in pop and electronic and groove
based styles but not really so much in the cinematic orchestral styles.
And if you're going to point to Hans Zimmer as an example of using looping
chord progression successfully, I will refer you back to a previous point.
If you can get your production value to the level of Hans Zimmer's
go ahead, loop all the chords you want.
But I don't think most of these tracks were at that level.
The key to having an element that repeats and
varies and develops over time is to make sure you're starting with a really strong motive.
That's why you should watch this video next where
I talk about the two killer features of any strong motive.
Thank you to everybody who submitted for the competition,
we'll be holding another one this summer, and thank you for watching.
I'll see you in the next one!