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:
- Composition: a reflection on the musical merits
(or lack thereof). This is a catch-all category for all
writing-related things that aren't the lyrics; I'm not nearly
well-versed enough with all the theoretical terms to split this down
any further.
- Lyrics: points for genuinely witty, emotional,
original lyrics (pick any two). Often not rated because I have a hard
time making out lyrics in a hurry when I'm paying attention to all the
other stuff. If you post your lyrics to the lyrics forum
before I review, it's extremely likely I'll at least rate them.
Unrated lyrics are marked with an asterisk; when I don't rate them, I
usually assume that they are in the "pretty nice" category when
calculating the total score.
- Feeling: the part of the review that's hard to
explain logically. Some things just click and some don't. This tends
to address the overall feeling or mood generated by everything else
taken together.
- Performance: reflections on both technical and
emotional aspects of your instrumental and vocal performance. I tend
to talk about synthesized elements in the composition or mix
department instead since they're not exactly performed.
- Mix: the technical part. Recording, mixing,
general engineering. Generally I'll be more forgiving of lo-fi
equipment than of mixing decisions that make the song sound worse (to
me) than it would have been without them.
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- The score used to be 3 points per category (pre June 2012; 0 = oh
my god please make me forget this; 1 = not extremely terrible, 2 =
pretty nice, 3 = great job), but at some point I felt I couldn't
adequately represent most songs with that scale. You can recognise
these old reviews easily: they have a total score given out of 15
instead of out of 25.