Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Amp Energy Rock Band Competition Results

We just participated in the Amp Energy competition at the University of Ottawa today. The picture above shows when the Reject finally took over the stage! =)

The video of our performance will eventually be posted on the Facebook page of the event. We also filmed so we'll eventually add an embedded Youtube video to this post.

I think we performed well and had a good choreography to match our band name, but unfortunately we didn't advance to next week's Facebook voting round. We diverged a bit from what we planned in our practice session but that can be expected.

The main reason we lost is that the only criteria for victory was having the most votes from the crowd and passers-by after a 30-minute+ voting period (and yes, I did say 30). The competition being near a busy corridor, most people who voted didn't see anyone perform. As the organizer told me: "This is just a popularity contest"...

One piece of advice for participants in future weeks is to make sure you're allowed to test the calibration. We weren't, and you can imagine the effect that it has... for example having to rely on the monitors a whole lot more than usual.

We also learned after playing our song that the "No Fail" mode was on, plus the official camera didn't even see the game screen, so a lot of bands just played on "Easy" (we were all on "Expert") and concentrated pretty much only on their moves.

What counts is that we had lots of fun, and that we now have even more "Live" experience! That can only help in future competitions. Hopefully most "performance"-based competitions in the future will have judges, so being the winner actually means something. The one we participated in two weeks ago was strictly "score"-based.

Rock on Macas!

1 comment:

DMan3021 said...

I look like I'm trying to pull a Stevie Wonder in that pic... lol!