telephone game?

[the idiot king]

hey all,

some friends of mine recently did a musical telephone game...the orchestrator wrote a song (i believe in a fairly stripped down fashion), and passed it along to the next participant. the orchestrator had an order, and basically told each person that they had a week or so, maybe ten days to record a cover of the song in any style, making any changes they saw fit. the primary rules were that it had to maintain the spirit of the original in some fashion; so complete disregard for existing lyrics were discouraged, but changes were welcome. the same goes for chord progression. but things such as genre, tempo, instrumentation, and even key changes were fair game right off the bar. the idea is that the first person to receive the song doesn't gut it so that it's unrecognizable from the first. that's no fun. but watching the song slowly morph into something else could be.

i don't want to set up voting for this, since everyone will have a unique spin on things. the real fun would be watching the A to B progression in action. i can host all of the results when we have a finished product if anyone's interested. does anyone wanna try something along these lines?

[signboy]

it could almost be done as a circle of covers, where each person pick a song to cover, then hands it off "to the left". Game ends when each person gets their song back. I suppose each person relying on the last for a deadline would make it suck, given how deadlines work around here. Anyway, just thinking out loud.

[HeuristicsInc]

i think there was an unofficial challenge like that on the fawm boards...
Hmm, maybe not - I see one where people used 50% of a song to make the next one. Maybe somebody else knows.
-bill

[the idiot king]

no one else interested? if not, i'll drop this.

[JonPorobil]

I'd be interested, but I'm concerned that this is one of those ideas where just one person flaking out could ruin the whole project, and those always kind of make me nervous.

[the idiot king]

I'd be interested, but I'm concerned that this is one of those ideas where just one person flaking out could ruin the whole project, and those always kind of make me nervous.

Oh, that's easy to fix. If they miss their deadline, they get skipped. Seem fair?

[fluffy]

Back on Remixfight there was a chain remix project which worked out pretty well - until the ORGANIZER disappeared.

[HeuristicsInc]

had really silly lyrics, though.
-bill

[the idiot king]

yeah, organizer flake out would be a pretty big detriment. unless it was designed to be work on its own, like if we had an outright list of order, and people passed the song along by themselves.

[Pigfarmer Jr]

FAWM has the unofficial challenge called 'the morphing song'
It was started by Tim Wille and I've participated in several. This last FAWM there were three chains in which I was part of one.
The rules are simple. One person writes a song. The second person must change 50% of the song. How that is done is up to the second person. The third person changes 50% of the second song and so on down the line. We generally do chains of 7-10. The first one ever was a few FAWMs ago and was amazing.

[Pigfarmer Jr]

There was also a telephone game some time back. The idea being one person wrote a song. The second person listened to the song one time and then tried to recreate it as best as s/he could. Then the third person would listen to the most recent song exactly one time etc etc. I'm not sure how well it worked out. I didn't participate.