So, I'm thinking about the next NGMT. I have quite a few ideas for it too.

For those of you who pay attention to my news feeds, here are some little tidbits of information for how it'll be held. Comments appreciated!

1. I will be the ONLY host. Samulis will by necessity be an honorary host since he owns the site which the ngmt is hosted on.
2. I don't want to hold this contest without a prize for the winners, and considering the amount of amazing music there was last time, I'm going to ask people if I can put their music in a bandcamp album for each round. All the money from these albums would go to the contest and nothing else - people can also opt out of it and put their music elsewhere as well if they want. It would be a totally optional thing.
3. Changes to the voting system: Every person gets three votes of equal value (1 "point") if they participate. They can't vote for the same song more than once, or their own song. If they use all their votes, they get one point added to their score. I'm tempted to also make it so that you get 2 extra points if you write feedback on every other submission.
4. Ties will be broken by the number of votes made by that person, so if you do all your votes and tie with someone who didn't vote, you win! If you gave two votes and they only gave one, you also win. This applies in the final decision for contest winners. If, after that, there's still a tie, the question is the number of reviews given. You review every song, you'll win the tie. If, after all that, the people are STILL tied, then... well, it's a tie and they split the prize. Not much else to do, after all. This is to encourage participation in all aspects of the contest. If nobody votes, then things are poo. If nobody reviews each other, that destroys one of the most amazing things from the first one. :(
5. There will be another "Inspired" round 3 with no limitation other than the theme. Trust me, if you participate in the whole contest, you WILL want a break. :D
6. CHALLENGE ONE will be... the "One-shot" round. All instruments need to decay within ten seconds (thanks to Forgotten Dawn for the time suggestion instead of measures) if you held a note for that long. (this doesn't count reverb, but don't put excessively long reverb or modulate the entire channel pitch or do some other fanciness, this is pretty darn straightforward) In other words, no pads, no leads, no strings (though pizzicatto is fine), no horns. "percussive" sound rules in this.
7. CHALLENGE TWO will be... the "Newborn" round. If you're new to making music and don't have fancy VSTs or anything yet, this will be great for you. If you do have a lot of fancy VSTi, you might end up hating this one. Remember when you used to use soundfonts for your orchestral instruments? Well, this limitation is that all instruments must be from the Fluid soundfont (It contains pretty much every kind of general instrument you could want. Also, there'll be a link to free soundfont VSTs right at the beginning of the contest and the round for convenience. Or right here. I'm pretty sure every DAW has its own soundfont player or it can use VSTs, so that shouldn't be an issue), with no resampling or editing of the soundfont allowed. This means no synthesis, no using your custom samples, and no using your EWQL Hollywood Series or Omnisphere or anything. You CAN put effects over the soundfont to make it sound better.

Themes are obviously not being told right now, but I have ideas. I'm also thinking that Scott Rogers will be the official NGMT artist, period. We have plans for more little subtle things in the artwork. I wonder how many people will catch them.

In other news, I'm still working on music and stuff. Finished a piano piece and getting it performed. camoshark put it into sheet music, so there'll be a download for that when it comes out. It's also been submitted to one contest and will be submitted to another one.

I have this other piece I've worked on for far too long where I dabble in dubby dirt stuff.

Aaaaaand finally another thing which I'm just mentioning to tease you about because there will be no more information about it until later. :D

I'm almost done with a massive marching band drum sample library for Versilian Studios, which should be released in March. Snare, four Basses, five Tenor drums, "The Crasher", rim shots, stick clicks, multiple different sticks for the clicks and tenors, multiple different hits for just about every drum, 2-5 velocity layers for every hit and 2-5 round-robin samples for each layer. Realism. Is. Good.

Alrighty, that's all from me. Bye!