Producer-Writer Battle Sign up by Thursday, Contest begins Friday, Feb. 13th at 8:00 p.m. so sign up now!

Remember that Friday, Feb. 13th at 8:00 p.m., we begin the Producer-Writer battle. I want all of you who are interested to sign up here please. That will help me know how many plan to participate so I can ensure we have a good ratio and enough rooms. Again, you do not have to have a webcam to participate, you can listen in, hear everybody, see everybody and text chat.

Basis for doing this: Producers do beat battles all the time but this is the first I've seen producers and writers battle it out! An A & R friend just recently texted me the other day and said that R Kelly was looking for writers to come in the other day to write to one track and asked me did I know any songwriters. There was a room full of songwriters writing to one track. So please believe there is mad competition in this business and you will have to compete to get on artists' projects.

What will come of it: It helps the producers find writers, helps the writers and producers meet first to decide on which direction to go with a song, and it will hopefully force us to finish all the songs started in this challenge. I'm also hoping that what will also come from it is a synergy from a meeting of the minds, a production/writing team or camp, some more hot songs and some fun from those who enjoy being pushed by others! If at any time someone is suspected of foul play, their team will be eliminated.

Preparation: So to get ready, please sign up first by replying to this discussion. Please bring full, open, formatted tracks. Writers bring ideas, song concepts and your pens! Each producer-writer will get their own virtual studio room. We will post your beat(s) in that room. You might even want to register with tokbox.com so that your name will show up in the chatroom.

Rules: There will be one producer and songwriter to a room. That will be the team. There can be more than one songwriter if there are not enough producers to go a round. But the teams should be relatively equal in number. Instead of producers picking their writers, I am going to put all producers in a hat and all writers in a hat and pull names. The "teams" will be announced on Friday morning. Each team has to create a full song. Each battle will be based on genre. So for example, all individual teams will create separate R & B songs in the first round of the battle. Second round, all teams will create a hip hop song, next pop, etc. If the team doesn't finish the song, that team will be disqualified. You will have 24 hours to finish the song. A new beat must be posted Friday morning. No prior finished song or half-finished song can be used so that everything can be done from scratch and no team has an unfair advantage. So we start Friday night at 8:00 p.m. and by Saturday night, the song must be done. You must post your song to the site by Saturday 10:00 p.m. EST for consideration. Then we judge the final songs on Sunday.... Songs are judged based on creativity, originality, melody, imagery/emotions, and structure with a 1 to 5 rating scale with 5 being the best. The winners of the battles will go on to compete at another time and dateJack has agreed to judge the competition.

So sign up by responding to this forum.

Any thoughts, questions and comments in furtherance of this battle, please post them here also so we can work out any kinks beforehand.

Thanks!!!