mello, I am only talking about when I'm trying to win - and it's clear that's what S.HUSH is referring to as well. I don't think the songs that I've won with are ape-ing Oddbod, or Barnadine, or whatnot - just trying to incorporate some of the factors that seem to help place their songs in the top spots on a regular basis.mellotronaut wrote:'Tram' is one of my all time favs, but you know that already ... .
Your and sHushi's comments are interesting and they smell a bit funny too.
I think, things are a bit more complicate. In my case: i try to oscillate between functional and dysfunctional, i try to learn from others and i try to forget, what i've learned too. I wanna be eclectic and i wanna have my own style. Oddbod is Oddbod and mello is mello. Music is mostly a listening process, yes it is: listening to and analyzing others' stuff and listening to oneself (means: inside and outside). Then comes playing and/or tweaking.
Lyrics: we can learn to write lyrics up to a certain degree, but then we have to forget, what we've learned.
Most important: i only want to have one Oddbod in the contest and i wanna have a good one. I don't want to have 20 imitators. Let's be quirky and varied!
m
I don't want to outright copy them. I tried to outright copy Beck when I did 'The Golden Age' for the masquerade month a couple years ago. I did a pretty good job and poured alot of effort into trying to copy as exactly I could the beatiful sonic soup of that song. I happened to win that month, but it was an empty win because it was a 'photorealistic' rendering of an existing photo.
Now, what I learned in the process was, however, very rich. There are production techniques that I had to use that month which I've used over and over since. It was the first time I ever did BGVs. Now I use BGVs all the time. I'm not copying Beck by doing BGVs (or oddbod for that matter - who uses them in almost every song - something else I failed to mention in my study of his winning tunes), but they are just another element that makes a song interesting if done well.
I write plenty of music that I would never enter into the contest because I'm writing it for a different purpose than trying to 'win'. Those songs go into the regular 'cafe', not the contest. Or onto a kid's CD which I'm currently, slowly working on.
The problem of trying to 'win' is that if you also have the goal of being quite quirky, then those two goals are nearly completely contradictory. Some can pull it off like Dr. Apostrophe X and Knockman (where were those guys this month?), but there is still a pop-element, pop meaning 'popular' in their winning tunes.
very good song, and i'm not just saying that cause i had a part in it - my part in it was reduced to a repeated 'we got the funk' utterance for the most part anyway 
to Markleford for having voted!
