I'm not in the lead because 425 doesn't love my songs enough 
Send better songs.
I've been trying to figure out how I do write-ups best in this roulette, since they were imo rather weak in my first roulette. At first I tried writing them in silence after my last listen of the songs, but that seemed to dry (and it was kind of boring to be honest 
). So now what I'm doing is just writing them while I listen to the songs one last time, so what you get in my write-ups are immediate reactions. Sometimes this leads to moments where I'm not quite finished with one sentence and then there's an awesome moment and I just write something along the lines of "OMG and the solo is amazing". Not very sophisticated, but I guess it gets the point across rather nicely.
This is pretty much exactly what I do—I write them while I'm listening to the songs for the last time. I then decide what the score is after completing the writeup, though obviously I usually have a decent idea of what the score is going to be coming in. I try to do a few things in the writeups:
- Give a brief stylistic description of the song so that anyone reading along who doesn't know it has a general idea of what I'm talking about, and so that I can comment on how I feel about the style of music ("I don't usually like death metal" "I often love chill electronic stuff like this").
- Comment on a few general things that I liked about the song; i.e., the vocal melodies, the riffs, the atmosphere.
- If I had a definite favorite part, name that and comment on why I liked it.
- If there was something I disliked or was confused by about the song, comment specifically on that.
- Most importantly, sum up the writeup by giving a general sense of how I feel about the song, with the goal of having the feeling I'm describing match the score that I'm going to give. If I'm giving a 4.5/5.0, my writeup should be glowing. If I'm giving a 3.0/5.0, I still probably like the song, but I should give some sense of what held it back from me and what I didn't particularly care for.
The writeups are often derived in part from informal notes that I take during my first and second listens. Here's an example of how that process typically takes place:
Bent Knee - Being Human
First Listen:
Wow sad piano intro and then we go off into some weird riffing stuff. This song is creepy. The female singer is good but this is creepy. Why is she imagining my dead body! I mean this seems really avant garde and I’m not sure I like this much at all. I see this submitted all the time and now I’m confused because like I expected this great thing and I just don’t get much from this at all. Maybe it will grow but what
Second Listen/Score Guess:
I mean, I really like the intro, and the singer has a quite nice voice. Whenever it calms down and gets all subtle and she sings, it’s pretty solid. The instrumentation is just bizarre. Why is she imagining my dead body? This actually reaches something I would call a pretty good crescendo. So this has some stuff I like a fair bit and stuff that’s like eh. Right now 3. Could grow. We’ll see.
Which results in:
Sacul: Bent Knee - Being Human
Okay, so this a very, very strange song. It opens off with a very creepy, very soft piano intro that does its job nicely. The singer is unquestionably talented, and the melodies are strong
And then things just get weird. The song kind of alternates between these nice little piano parts and these big bombastic, abrasive sections of staccato intrumentation.
I’m going to be quite honest, on first listen, I was completely turned off. I didn’t like this song at all. It got better on repeated listens to the extent that I can make sense of what is going on the entire time. And there’s a significant amount of stuff that I genuinely like. The singer is quite talented and the vocal parts are all pretty good.
The downside: a lot of the instrumentation isn’t really my thing. The staccato parts are not that appealing to me, and I would definitely prefer the piano and vocal parts appearing in a somewhat different song. This is one of those songs that feels a little to me like it’s trying too hard to be different for the sake of being different. On the other hand, I really did like some things about it quite a bit. So while I don’t really get the roulette favorite status it seems that this might enjoy, it will get a decent score from me.
With a score of 3.0/5.0.
The result here is that I have some fairly long writeups. But from what I'm seeing in this conversation, people seem to prefer that, so that seems to be all good. Personally, I can't imagine distilling three or four listens and a week of thinking about a song into just one sentence like "I liked the heavy parts, but the singer was annoying. 3/5." And I totally understand people's frustration with that kind of writeup, so I try to err on the side of providing more detail rather than less.
I have no idea who Mr. Red is, but if he likes Sacul's submissions he is most likely not a human being
This is true, and I can't say I've seen direct evidence that Mr. Red is human.
Topic: 2016 Roulette Championship v. THE CONCLUSION (Read 107540 times)
