GatewayRedbirds.com

So as mentioned in the earlier thread, I am going to run a new tournament here on GRB. All users are eligible to enter (except me, who will abstain from participating as I'm running it).

The tournament is for "Best Covered Song." It will be NCAA bracket style. It is intentionally very broad - any genre, any decade/era, any artist, any skill level, any language (English is preferred obviously, but you could submit a song in French or Spanish or German or [expletive] Indian if you want - just realize a lot of people won't understand what the hell is being said). A cover of Taylor Swift is just as eligible as a cover of Johnny Cash. If you record yourself blaring Michael Jackson's "Beat It" from your garage, it's completely eligible so feel free to submit it. In fact, I encourage you to submit it whether or not you want it in the tournament.

The only restrictions are:

1) No holiday songs. There are already a million different versions of the same 10 songs.
2) The song being covered has to have had a commercial retail release by the original artist. I don't care if they only sold 10 copies of the original song, but you better have been able to buy it if you wanted to.
3) No David Hasslehoff. Foreign songs are fine, but he's just [expletive] creepy when he sings in German.

The tournament brackets will be by genre, seeding will be based on the total lifetime albums sold by the original artist. So if you pick Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower," your song's position in the bracket will be based on the total number of albums Bob Dylan has sold in his lifetime.

Everyone is encouraged to PM me with up to THREE songs. Your top two songs will be used for the tournament, and the third will be a reserve in case someone else has already sent me one of your songs first. Each song is obviously first come first served, and can only be used by one person total. If you only send me one, and it's Pearl Jam's "Last Kiss" and five other people already selected it, I will message you back and ask you to pick a different song. So rather than avoiding a bunch of back and forth, just send me a list of three songs. If we end up with a full 64 people who participate, I will drop everyone back and only use your top song. I don't have the time to run two separate 64 seed brackets.

Please send them to me in this format so I can enter everything into my spreadsheet easier:

COVERING ARTIST: SONG, ORIGINAL ARTIST, YOUTUBE LINK

So if you picked Alien Ant Farm's "Smooth Criminal", this is what you would send me:

Alien Ant Farm: Smooth Criminal, Michael Jackson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDl9ZMfj6aE

I will let nominations run through Friday evening unless it fills up sooner with all 64 participants. Starting on Saturday I will begin populating everything in the bracket. Hopefully on Monday I will be able to start creating official threads for each particular matchup. Each matchup will run for 48 hours, although once we get to the Elite Eight or Final Four we may run it for longer. In order to prevent overloading and spamming the main forum pages on Social, I will try to only do 8 matchups at a time, unless everyone wants me to do more and the mods are okay with it, in which case I'll throw up more than that for each round.

I think that is everything, although if I think of anything else I'll add it here. Feel free to use this thread for general smack talk. Obviously the best smack talk will be reserved for each particular thread, but general stuff can go here. Users are encouraged to pimp the hell out of your artist in your respective threads.

Let me know if you guys have any other questions. Mortimer and Spider John, you each already sent me one artist - please resend them using the above format (also feel free to add two additional songs).

LET THE GAMES BEGIN!!!!!!

Less than 12 hours in, and a bunch of awesome songs have already been registered, including some powerhouse songs that I didn't even know were originally covers.

My favorite so far is probably ICE's reserve song.

Let me see if we can get a separate forum set up for this.

So gashouse PMed me his songs and brought up a good point - what should the voting criteria be?

Best quality of the cover?
Better than the original?
Whatever you want?

Personally, I would encourage users to vote for whoever they want using whatever rationale they want. What makes a cover great to one person may be totally different than from another. Discussions are great, so put your voting rationale in the comments.

I think the last tourney I participated in was TFG's "best leading female vocalist" one back in like 2010. Some fantastic songs came out of that and the reasons people liked whatever song they posted (as well as why they voted for whatever song was up in that particular round) led to some great discussions.

Swirls wrote:So gashouse PMed me his songs and brought up a good point - what should the voting criteria be?

Best quality of the cover?
Better than the original?
Whatever you want?

Personally, I would encourage users to vote for whoever they want using whatever rationale they want. What makes a cover great to one person may be totally different than from another. Discussions are great, so put your voting rationale in the comments.

I think the last tourney I participated in was TFG's "best leading female vocalist" one back in like 2010. Some fantastic songs came out of that and the reasons people liked whatever song they posted (as well as why they voted for whatever song was up in that particular round) led to some great discussions.

Whichever song/version I like better was going to be my voting criteria.

These rules stink, I'm out and I'm taking Tiffany with me.

stlouie_lipp wrote:

Swirls wrote:So gashouse PMed me his songs and brought up a good point - what should the voting criteria be?

Best quality of the cover?
Better than the original?
Whatever you want?

Personally, I would encourage users to vote for whoever they want using whatever rationale they want. What makes a cover great to one person may be totally different than from another. Discussions are great, so put your voting rationale in the comments.

I think the last tourney I participated in was TFG's "best leading female vocalist" one back in like 2010. Some fantastic songs came out of that and the reasons people liked whatever song they posted (as well as why they voted for whatever song was up in that particular round) led to some great discussions.

Whichever song/version I like better was going to be my voting criteria.

Well, yeah, I figured that was a given. If you considered them equal, then I tried to give some other ideas for voting methodologies.

I struggle in coming up with "bests" on a dime. Surely am not alone in this.

There's a podcast that I listen to often , one of the last questions to the interviewees is "favorite beer?" -and I end up working that over in my head to frustration.

Hope the muse pays me a visit by tourney tip-off.

Freed Roger wrote:I struggle in coming up with "bests" on a dime. Surely am not alone in this.

There's a podcast that I listen to often , one of the last questions to the interviewees is "favorite beer?" -and I end up working that over in my head to frustration.

Hope the muse pays me a visit by tourney tip-off.

I figure all of the popular ones are taken, plus I don't give a [expletive] about winning. My plan is to nominate a couple that I enjoy and take my defeat in style.

I hope the results of our tournie don't just match, like, the top 10 Rolling Stone listicle of all time greatest covers. Yes, we all know that Johnny Cash's "Hurt" and Jimi's "All Along the Watchtower" are masterpieces. I for one am going to be voting for the interesting gems, bizarre re-interpretations, and rethought versions that make you reconsider something about the original that you may have missed before.