Song Fight! turns 25 in June

[Lunkhead]

I was just reminded that Song Fight! will be turning 25 in June this year (2025). Anybody have ideas for how to celebrate?

[ken]

Video cover fight of the first fight

[Lunkhead]

Video cover fight of the first fight

That sounds like fun!

[Lunkhead]

On the Slack I posted that maybe we turn some of Song Fight Live this year into Song Fight's 25th birthday party. Maybe we get cake and candles and party hats and sing/play happy birthday. Now I'm thinking maybe we have an extra live fight of folks writing new birthday songs for Song Fight.

[ken]

Great idea! Would love to see a big Song Fight birthday sheet cake at SFL. What if the blank and blank name live fight title were related?

[Lunkhead]

Happy 25th birthday Song Fight!

[fluffy]

I had planned on posting something profound today but it turns out I’m bad at profundity. But man, 25 years. That’s an eternity in Internet time. Back in 2000, sharing music online was super difficult; webhosting space was expensive, mp3 still wasn’t universally supported, most people were still on dialup, and even downloading the fight with as many as TEN songs!!! would take hours. Not to mention that the technology available for making music was also super limited and most of us were doing janky bullshit with boom boxes and half-duplex soundcards that couldn’t even record and play at the same time, much less handle multitrack audio.

When Song Fight! started, social media wasn’t even a thing yet. So many things that we take for granted online now just plain didn’t even exist.

Today I spend a lot of my time performing music in VRChat to audiences around the world in realtime, and most of the songs I sing are ones that I originally wrote for Song Fight!. Whenever I mention this, invariably someone in the audience will say something like, “oh wow, Song Fight! I entered it once, that’s still going?!?!” and sometimes I get people to at least consider coming back.

Here’s to another 25 years.

[Caravan Ray]

Video cover fight of the first fight

That sounds like fun!

I like this idea.

[Lunkhead]

Maybe it'd be fun for the crusty olds who are still here to talk about how they used to record and produce their songs for Song Fight back in the early '00s?

I had been doing multitrack recording on a Tascam Portastudio 424 4-track cassette recorder for maybe about 10 years before I started submitting songs for Song Fight. I got a drum machine early on, an Alesis HR-16. I remember I used to sequence the drums on it for whole songs on it's 2 row, 8 character per row LCD screen. So ridiculous! Then I would use the 4-track to record parts, bouncing three tracks down to one to add more layers. Total stone age stuff by today's standards. i did at one point "advance" to being able to use a Mac with a MIDI adapter and a MIDI sequencer to sequence drums for songs.

When I started submitting songs for Song Fight, I still had my 4-track, which had RCA audio outputs. The Mac I had at the time happened to have RCA audio inputs for whatever reason. I think it was a Power Macintosh 6100AV. So I was able to use my 4-track as my "preamp" and "mixer" and run its RCA outs to the Mac's RCA ins and use the Mac's built-in "sound card" as my "audio interface". I don't remember what sort of low sample rate and bit depth digitizing the Mac was doing. I had pirated a hacked beta version of Cubase 1 for the Mac somehow, maybe off Limewire or Gnutella or some such. It had MIDI sequencing similar to what I was used to and for whatever reason the audio part worked similarly enough to a 4-track for my brain to make the adjustment relatively easily. I started off with a couple super cheap Radio Shack dynamics microphones, a cheap electric guitar, a cheap acoustic guitar, a cheap bass, and a used Korg X5 keyboard. I didn't have the old drum machine anymore, so I used the drum presets on the Korg. I don't recall there being a lot of options for VST instruments back then (or any plugins at all, maybe, for that version of Cubase for Mac).

[fluffy]

I've talked about this a bunch in other spots but sure!

My very first Song Fight! entry was recorded before I knew how to play guitar. I only had half-duplex recording and I was super used to using Impulse Tracker for all my shitty techno music, so what I did was recorded a bunch of guitar strums (on a shitty guitar I just bought at a pawnshop, and I didn't have any picks so I used a broken chunk of a misburned CD-R) and then cut it up into samples. Then I recorded my vocals and cut them up into samples too, and then sequenced it all in Impulse Tracker.

This workflow fucking sucked so then I bought a Tascam Portastudio 4-track tape recorder, but for a bunch of my songs I still ended up sequencing the backing track in Impulse Tracker, recorded it to tape, and then recorded my vocals over it. (And Repair My Heart was purely Impulse Tracker.)

I kept on trying a bunch of different things (Acid music among others) but nothing really stuck.

A while later I took a break from Song Fight! and during that break, mc3p0 (who entered as "Swedish Masturbation Unit") reached out to me and suggested I try CoolEdit Pro's multitrack mode, and that began my journey into learning how to use an actual DAW-like. And then later I got a copy of Final Cut Pro 4 which had Apple Soundtrack which was closer to a real DAW (it's what eventually became GarageBand), and then after that it was Cubase, then GarageBand, and then finally in 2005 I switched full-time to Logic Pro (after learning a bit of Logic for my job at Ubisoft), and have been with that ever since.

I also had so many different piecemeal hardware solutions over the years, like early on I had a Radio Shack DJ mixer as part of my workflow, and I spent so much money avoiding buying a real audio interface by spending way too much on shitty audio interfaces. My first "real" interface was a PreSonus FireStudio Project, which lasted until Apple switched to ARM in 2020 and its aging Intel-only driver (which was already a pain to keep working in the post-FireWire world) stopped working. These days I have a Scarlett 18i20 and an ADA8200, which I am happy with.

I recently released, uh, "remasters" of my early Song Fight! shit as Deadnames, as a companion to Transitions which is actual rerecordings/reworkings of those songs that I'm actually finally happy with after 25 years.

[roymond]

I built a PC from parts in the mid ‘80s and got an audio card that would sync to my Tascam 4 track Portastudio, using one of its tracks for the sync signal. I forget what software I used! That gave me three tracks of audio and however many MIDI instruments the CPU could handle on the PC. I bought a huge Roland rack sampler, a Yamaha DX7, and a TR 808 drum machine. MIDI hardware meant all those parts were effectively "live", combined with the tape parts and often live guitar through a 12 channel mixer and recorded on DAT.
These are from those days, bouncing tracks on the Tascam:
Pavement
How hot is it?
Term Credits

In’91 I bought a Mac and Notator Logic, later called Emagic Logic Audio. Logic meant I could do it all on the Mac. Apple bought Logic in the early 2000s. I still use Logic. All my Songfight entries were made in Logic/LogicPro. It's so fucking easy to produce today compared to the 80s & 90s.

[jack]

I was playing a lot of music with Eric, both in a band and as a (mostly) acoustic duo, and I had been teaching myself multi-track recording for a few years, mostly recording band practices 4 track live and recording original songs Eric and I were working on at the time. This was maybe 1994 or 95. I started out on a Tascam Portastudio 4 track cassette recorder, then I was gifted the Tascam 488 from the band practices. At this point, I bought my first D/A converter (a first version MBox) that was bundled with ProTools and away I went. I started learning ProTools and bouncing down CDs for the band and friends.

Sometime while all this was happening, I was scanning CraigsList for music gear and I saw an ad that Blue Lang had posted in the community section letting people know about SongFight, with a link to the site. On a whim, Eric and I were playing guitar at my flat in San Francisco and we decided to try it, so we wrote and recorded "Shreds" on the spot in a few hours and submitted it. We told all our friends about it and to go vote for us so of course we won without knowing the unwritten rule of self promoting your song. That Shreds fight had some might good shit in it, better than ours, but we took our win in stride and stuck around. I submitted most of my SF stuff using the MBox and ProTools until Garageband came out, which made things simpler and gave me access to tons of loops. I've also used Logic, but it tends to overwhelm and baffle me at times.

And a big shout out to the whole community here, and all the people I've collaborated with on recordings over the years, played live with over the years, and learned from over the years. It's a great community, which is why I'm still lurking around here! As Yook might say "Viva La Songfight".