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TaintedLogic
Hi. I'm Andrew. Audio portal junkie since 2010, supporter since 2017. I always want to improve what I do! I make music, run the NGUAC, post poetry on BBS, and am the all-time #2 audio reviewer. I love this site, and I want to make it the best I can! ^_^

Andrew Mikula @TaintedLogic

Age 26, Male

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Bates College

Wellesley, Massachusetts

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NGAUC 2016 - Rules and Scheduling

Posted by TaintedLogic - June 20th, 2016


The following is a list of rules and structural details regarding the NGAUC 2016, my annual audio contest here on NG.

 

RULES

1. Participants can enter the competition as a team of two. If the members of your “team” would otherwise be placed in different groups as solo artists, the team will be placed in the group corresponding to the highest fan total among its members (e.x., if one member has 20 fans and the other has 60, and the All Stars each have 50 fans or more, the team will compete in the All Stars group). Teams of more than 2 are not permitted. Also, if you are entering as a team of 1, YOU CANNOT HAVE A COLLABORATION AS YOUR TRYOUT PIECE or as any other piece for the competition. The only exception is when you have someone sing or play an instrument for you, but you must still compose the music and lyrics yourself AND mix/master the piece. Both members of a team don’t necessarily have to contribute to all of the pieces submitted as part of the contest. Also, you may only submit one song per round, regardless of whether you are on a team or not.

2. The pieces you make for the competition should be full-length songs of the musical variety (of any genre). We won’t accept audio that has the sole purpose of being comedic, not to mention sound effects, voice acting, or parodies. You may use pre-packaged loops and samples in your piece, but be aware that after a certain point abusing presets compromises your track’s originality. For tryouts, it's okay to submit covers, arrangements, remixes, remakes, mash-ups, and pieces with samples downloaded from the internet. In the Knock-out and Final rounds, no participant may submit covers, arrangements, mash-ups, remakes, or remixes. No participant may create samples for the purpose of using them in a Knock-out or Final round piece before that corresponding round begins.

3. You must be able to submit your song to Newgrounds in order to enter the competition. This mandates compliance with all general NG Audio Portal regulations, as well as that you need a Newgrounds account. No submissions from Soundcloud, Bandcamp, iTunes, Spotify, Audiojungle, etc. will be accepted!  

4. You can post commentary in the threads dedicated to the competition, but please keep it friendly! If you have any complaints about judges’ scores or the contest in general, PM THEM instead of embarrassing yourself by whining about how great you thought your piece was. Just because this is a special contest doesn’t mean regular BBS and Audio Portal rules don’t apply. The mods will be watching this contest with their fangs already bared, and rumor has it that if you get bitten you become one of them (and no one wants that!). Therefore, please use common sense and THINK BEFORE YOU POST, because no one wants to have to avoid even more vampiric mods. Also, you’re encouraged to support and review the pieces of your competitors.

5. The judges are not obligated to review any of the pieces you submit to the competition, but you may request reviews from your judges or simply PM them with questions. I’ll make it clear who is judging a given group during a given round, as each individual judge doesn’t score everyone, especially early on when there are dozens of participants per group. The judges should give participants a score out of 10 and be able to thoroughly explain how they arrived at that score by considering a variety of parameters. These parameters may vary by judge, however, and judges are highly encouraged to make their scoring methods public. Scores are averaged among the judges to determine who advances to future rounds.

6. PARTICIPANTS MAY NOT start working on their Knock-out or Final Round tracks until the corresponding forum thread is posted. A general rule-of-thumb is that anything you do to prepare for your piece ahead of time needs to be something you could do if you were blind, deaf, dumb, and wearing a straightjacket. In addition, no one is allowed to update their track (i.e., replace or delete the audio file in Newgrounds' Project System) during the judging phases until results are released for the following round.

 

SCHEDULING TIDBITS:

1. The tryout submission phase closes at 23:59 (11:59 p.m.) Eastern Daylight Time on July 8th, 2016. Before then, you must link to the piece you want the judges to consider in this thread. The piece can be something you wrote years ago, or you can make it from scratch specifically for the competition. You can also change the piece you’d like us to judge by CLEARLY stating in the thread you’d like to change it as well as providing a link to your new piece. Starting July 5th at noon (EDT), we will no longer allow participants to change or update their tryout pieces in any way. This is so that the judges can have more time to score submissions in a year when we have many more competitors than expected.

2. Immediately after the tryout submission phase, the participants will be grouped evenly based on their fan totals. This ensures that the true “Underdogs” of the competition advance as far as possible without directly competing with more experienced and knowledgeable musicians. In the past, there have been 3 groups (the Underdogs, Professional Amateurs, and All Stars), but there may or may not be more this year, depending on how many participants there are.

3. After tryouts comes the Knock-out Round, which starts on July 16th! Another thread will be posted in the BBS tagging all of the competitors who have advanced, who will have until July 30th at 23:59 (11:59 pm) EDT to submit their made-from-scratch, original new tracks.

4. The judges will accept certain competitors into a Final Round by August 4th. Last year, the final round consisted of 4 people from each group. The walls of the groups are then torn down and it’s a free-for-all bloodbath (through music!) to see who gets a spot in the legendary top 3. The deadline for final round submissions is August 18th at 23:59 EDT., and the winners will be announced on August 22th. For the Final Round, all judges score every single participant.

Prizes will include forum signatures for the top 3 finishers boasting of their success in the competition, as well as spots on the front page of the Audio Portal the week after the competition.

Thank you in advance for following the rules. Good luck and (most importantly) have fun! :D

 


1

Comments

maybe ill get in this time

Well, good luck! :)

The song i'm working on atm (fl studio) is so overloading on my pc, i can't listen to certain parts unless i render it. Any tips that could help?

Is there any way you could pinpoint the plugins that are using the most CPU and replace them?

I'll be joining this.

@poinl - maybe try rendering a few stems so you can take out the plugins? I'm having similar problems with a current project of mine, and rendering stems helped a lot.

Great! Good luck. ;)

...and thanks for helping out with Poinl's DAW woes. ^^

@gragon73, i really thought it would work. It's like a section is cursed to lag no matter what i place in there.

ERMAGERSH I hope I make it in!

Good luck man. ;)

i thought you were gonna send me an email! XD hahaa just kidding, I'm happy someone wrote in the 2015 thread an it poped up in my news activity :D I'll prepare one for this year's thread :D

We're actually clawing our way through the PM list right now, but it's an extremely tedious process. I actually only finished compiling the list yesterday, and I still have over 700 people to contact. Either way, I'm glad you plan on participating again! Good luck. ;)

Need me for the sigs again? :)

That would be awesome! I'm actually honored that you reached out to me! Thanks so much Decky. ;D Shall we continue discussing this through PM?

Why not buddy. I'm quite busy this weekend but I will get back to you ASAP If not today.

Sure. Take your time. I really appreciate this!

I have a perfect idea... XD Oooooohh, i'm so evil!
I'm already doing an AMAZING job on 2 new tracks, and i'll post my best old for now...
Let's hope that the things are going nice.

Oops... i almost did something wrong here XD I need to be extra carefull..... Who knows what can show up around any corner XD

Alright. Good luck, man. ;)

Also, can there be Previews (WIP-s)?

I'd recommend submitting a structurally complete piece to the competition. Whether or not this is acceptable is at the discretion of the judges, but you may not want to take that chance.

This is the first time I try anything like this, and I really like how everything is managed on this contest, I'm surely going to give it a try! Good luck eveyone!

Thanks man! Good luck yourself. ;)

Can I submit a song for tryouts that I posted to both Newgrounds AND SoundCloud that I made? I posted it to Newgrounds first.

Yes. As long as it's on Newgrounds, you're all set. Sorry for the slow reply. ;)

Alright! We got A LOT of songs and ideas we haven't uploaded anywhere so I guess this competition would be a good place to start!

Great! Good luck, man. ;)

I will join and I am almost ready! :)

And i just need to upload song and then what? I am not good at english :/

After you post your song in the tryout thread (http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1410643/1), the judges will be scoring all of the songs during a "judging phase" which lasts until July 16th. On the 16th, I will create a new forum thread that contains the results and scores of the tryout phase. Some competitors will make it into the Knock-out Round and others won't. The contest has 3 rounds in total and is expected to last until mid-August.

Also, may I ask what your first language is? I might be able to connect you with another Newgrounder who could explain this contest to you in your first language.

Hope that helps! :)

So lemme get this straight. No one is getting kicked out from the tryouts, just categorized? And then there is only one more round where the winners are chosen? Sorry if this is a stupid question, for some reason I don't quite understand.

That is incorrect, I'm afraid. About half of you will be accepted into the Knock-out Round from Tryouts. Then, about 10-12% of the remaining competitors will be accepted into the Final Round. The top 3 overall will receive forum sigs and will have their Final Round submissions front-paged. Hope that clears it up! ;)

Wait is there any runner-up prizes for anyone who get into the final round? 3 people over a lot of people is very tough ;)

As of now, I'm afraid not. Perhaps the real prize is that you've been driven to drastically improve all aspects of your musicality, mastering and production abilities, etc.

However, if you want to see if anyone in the thread is willing to contribute any prizes voluntarily, I wouldn't be opposed.

:)

here's some dissonant stuff i noticed, probably not the best place to do it but oh well

0:27

:42-:43

:56

1:38

2:14, 2:18

hopefully that maybe helps o_O

Yes! Thanks, Johnfn. I'll look into it. :)