The other week, I wrote about my favourite songwriting competition: SpinTunes. The sign-up process is over and now the competition is officially underway. For a number of reasons, I am extremely excited about this incarnation of SpinTunes.
The first of these reasons is that GeekMom core contributor, Rebecca Angel, decided to join the competition! Seriously! How awesome is that?! The second of these reasons is that a lot of my favourite past competitors have decided to come back for more punishment excellent songwriting prompts. The third of these reasons is that there are a lot of new faces. And this brings me to the forth reason I am so excited, there are LOADS of people participating in SpinTune 4. How many? FORTY-THREE! Yes, 43 groups and individuals have decided to jump on board and sink their creative teeth into whatever the judges decide to throw at them. You can find out more about the competitors here.
And what have the judges decided to throw at them first? I think my jaw may have dropped when I read the challenge for round one. The challenge for round one has two parts. The first part is a topical challenge. The second part is a technical challenge. The topic that they have to write about is a childhood nightmare. When I read that, my brain began to flood with the reoccurring nightmares I had as a child, nightmares about my family being killed by Daleks, or flying and not being able to return to the earth, or crashing down the stairs. The technical part of this challenge is that the songs must make significant use of rubato. Rubato is a fancy name for a tempo change. There is a little bit more to it than that. You can read what Wikipedia has to say about rubato here. The song must be a minimum of two minutes long. It must be submitted by 23:59 EST on January 29, 2012.
After I picked my jaw off of the ground, the anticipation began to build. I really cannot wait to hear what all of the competitors come up. If all 43 competitors successfully hand their songs in on time, that means 13 people will be eliminated during round one. For more information about how eliminations work, you can read the full rules here.
If you are a songwriter and you would like to sink your teeth into this challenge, you are more than welcome to. Anyone, at any time, can shadow these challenges. Even challenges from previous rounds of SpinTunes. All you have to do is write the song and e-mail a download link to SpinTunes. Your song will be played during the next listening party and will be posted to the appropriate SpinTunes BandCamp album. You can find out more details here.
Good luck to all the SpinTunes competitors! Happy songwriting! I cannot wait to hear what you create when the songs are revealed during the first listening party on January 30, 2012 at 20:00 EST. I invite you all to join us in UStream here.
Now then, I want to ask you, what childhood nightmare would you write about?
As a child (and sometimes as an adult), I have had a nightmare about zombies (and this was waaaaaay before the recent interest in the monsters!). I have very vivid dreams and this one usually starts with a zombie in a drive-through bank window- all gross and scary under those fluorescent lights. I would dream that they were after me and my family and I would somehow get separated from them and end up hiding under the back porch at the first home I lived in. I would crawl under the porch into the dirt and then the shuffling, moaning zombies would invade the backyard!
I hope I don’t have this dream tonight!