Great concept and rules @Doug! Will look for a sample coming weekend.
To elaborate on the idea of releasing a tape: we’ve been doing these battles for a year now, and we’ve had 11 winning tracks by 8 people so far (some people won twice). To celebrate the amazing stuff that we’ve made this year my idea was to put out a tape with the 12 winning tracks of the first year of elektronauts beat battles, including the 11 previous winning submissions and the track winning this battle. We could look for someone to make nice coverart for this, and put it on at least soundcloud and bandcamp. It’s something i’d like to listen to for sure. How do you guys feel about this idea?
Agreed great concept. I will do my best to make time for this one. Work is kicking my ass.
I wanted to share something related, but slightly off topic. I just finished reading “Dilla Time” and bookmarked this page that describes the way Jay Dilla would approach beat battles. It gets going at the second paragraph, but read the whole page dammit. Could something like this work for a future Elektronauts battle?
@Sleepyhead what if we actually found a way to press a record? I know nothing about the process (funding, pressing, distribution), but that would be pretty sick.
That would be awesome, but pressing vinyl is pretty expensive…
I remember a group I worked with once released one of our tapes on vinyl and if I recall it correctly this was about $1000 for a couple 100 records even though they had it pressed somewhere in eastern europe which offered the lowest prices
I guess I’d be down with the idea but not sure if everyone would be willing to spent money on this.
Not sure I’ll have time to enter this one, but just to clarify one point in case I do. For external instruments like guitar, bass, or keys they would need to be played in live since you can’t loop them? Does that also mean if you came up with a guitar or bass part, you can’t copy/paste it into another section of the song?
Yeah, when I was coming up with the rules, I was thinking of an old studio set up. The fact that you only have so much sample time doesn’t really impact your ability to record some keys to tape.
So as far as copying sections like repeating the same part for a chorus or something. I’m inclined to say that’s fine. And if you want to loop something you can still do that. I just think it should count towards your sample time.
29 seconds is way longer than it sounds with regards to samples, I just checked out of interest, and I haven’t even used that amount of sample time in the last 3 battles added together.
Excluding acapella of course
Not sure if I will be able to make it as both work and the remodeling of hour house are eating up most of my time (besides the kids of course ;-), but I will definitely try.
Here is something I sampled not so long ago, for my ‘first’ - RZA inspired - beat that you guys actually helped me with.
either something’s been going on with youtube or somewhere else in the inter tubes, because most of these links have shown as unavailable for me so far. they work when clicking through, though. maybe the cloud’s full again.
