jast's Song Fight reviews: the small print

Scoring system

I'm using the Arbitrary Review System I came up with after a few months of reviewing on Song Fight. It's an attempt at making the reviews more specific and more helpful. I am dividing each review into five categories, along with a score of 0-5 for each of these categories (0 = oh my god please make me forget this, 1 = pretty terrible/boring, 2 = okay, 3 = pretty nice, 4 = great, 5 = super awesome). Note that relatively few 4s and 5s will be given out, so if yours isn't all 4s, that doesn't mean it's terrible or anything.

Anyway. The categories are:

Finally, I'm giving you a total score based on the sum of the scores in all of these categories. Rarely, I will add or subtract a point if I feel that the sum of the scores does not adequately reflect the quality of your song. Please note that if you get a lower score than someone else, that doesn't necessarily mean I like the other song better, so don't take this overall score too literally.

General points

  1. Highly subjective. I am bound to make lots of judging statements when I review a fight. I will usually try to supply the observations that led to the verdict so that you can decide whether it has merit or is just completely retarded.
  2. No lyrics. I do believe I'm quite good with "ze English". Still, it takes somewhat more effort for me to make out lyrics in English, and if I do that it takes away from the time I can spend on the remaining aspects of your song. Post your lyrics to the lyrics forum and I will probably consider them in my review, though.
  3. No excuses. Just because your vocals (or recording, drumming, whatever) have always been crappy, you're not excused from working on it, so I won't gloss over anything. My reviews are strictly honest because this raises the chances that they'll be useful to you.
  4. Biased. There are a couple of genres I just can't get into. I will make an effort to review songs anyway but my reviews are likely to be shorter and less informative. I probably won't know enough about how the genre is done right to be much help. You might see me write something like "okay" or "average"; that usually means that I can't see anything wrong with the song but it doesn't really pull me in either.
  5. Random voting. What makes me vote for a song? It depends. If a song is extremely well-done technically, I'll probably vote for it even if I don't like it much. In that case it'll have to really shine in all ways, though: performance, structure, arrangement, engineering (and lyrics, if you posted them).
    On the other hand, of course, I don't randomly like songs, so personal preference certainly says something about some kind of quality as well. I won't always be able to explain why I like a song, so if I vote for a song despite not writing a glowing review, feel free to complain to me, I'll patiently ignore everything you say.
  6. In-depth review. My fight reviews will be rather brief for each song since it takes quite a while to write the entire set. I usually review very quickly and that's the price. However, I will gladly give you a more in-depth review if you ask me, either in the review thread or by private message. It's not very likely that many people will take me up on this offer so I'll probably be able to devote quite a bit more attention to your song.
    What's in it for you? I'll try very hard to talk about every little thing that was good or bad. I tend to be very picky, too. To make the negative points more helpful, I'll probably throw in lots of suggestions, too. This all boils down to new ideas and insight for you. At least that's the plan.

Historical notes