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I like the sound

Lol.

Why do you have to be above 18 to complete this? Seems a bit unnecessary, motivation does not come with age, but with passion.

Well the piccolo trumpet would make sense, it didn't even occur to me that you would've used one. Now I'm just wondering why you've included the bassoon? It seems like odd orchestration.

Perhaps I mixed it poorly because there is a trumpet together with a flute and bassoon playing the melody line with a piccolo trumpet entering with the extremely high part at the end of the line. It blended too well it seems

Hey, I love how well you captured the essence of the march! However, I didn't seem to her any trumpet, and that's an essential part to the march! Were they playing with the winds in the first melody? Or do they come in with that (extremely) high part at the end of the melody. Anyways, great melodies, I would definitely expand on this! I really loved the tuba/triangle combo at the end!

These two topics have been merged. Have a nice day.

I'm glad you brought this up because I think its time to tell the truth about YC as a website. I've been either complaining to Jason or keeping mum but I'm just gonna let it all out now and you do with it what you will. I do hope you heed the community's concerns because the site may fall apart if you don't, which, sad to say, is almost what happened last December. To start, I'll answer your questions directly. Nope. I'm at home with the community, to a point, but the website? No way. Yes and no. I think the network sucks as implemented currently. The forum is ok, but could use plenty of work. Nope. Haven't used it once because its too clunky and all the "fields" for searching aren't very well thought out. Only when forced. Sometimes Jason will IM me but I never solicit anyone to IM over YC. Seems like a pointless feature personally and makes the place look like a mediocre Facebook wannabe. Like? The graphic in the header, and the people. Good people here. Dislike? A whole lota stuff. Now to answer some of your suggestions questions directly: NO! Absolutely not. This place is not Facebook and will never be it. PLEASE don't go down that road, even though you already did... :( Lots. We'll get to this in a moment. That's a bit of an idiotic guide question because the community is self-serving. People want something that will benefit them before they ever care about it benefiting the community. Thus, the site has to do both. It has to be selfish and selfless at the same time. That may seem like an oxymoron, but it really isn't. For example, if I want to upload my composition, I want to be uploaded in my way. However, once its uploaded the way I wanted, the piece can serve the community, like in comments on pieces. They can all be shared and we can work together, as mutual colleagues in composition, to write better works. Work together to accomplish a personal goal while gaining something in the process. Selfish and selfless at the same time. Absolutely. In fact, that's what I'd love to focus on the most, what makes YC unique from other sites while still being within this decade (as in 2010s) technologically. So now, some thoughts on the website as it stands: The fundamental problem with this site is twofold, a) the site design is not technologically up to date and good to look at, and b) the site does not entice people to use it because it isn't very user-friendly. I'll echo Drake's comments when he said "Whoever designed the Network were fools." I agree with him because it was done in the wrong way, in so many different facets. I'll explain my reasoning as follows: Young Composers has never been a "site" so much as a community. It is the people that come here every day to post pieces and interact with each other that make up the website. This is a fundamental rule of all internet interactions: without people behind those usernames there's no community and thus the site is dead. Another rule of internet interaction is that people must become regular members of the community at a certain place that they are willing to congreagate to, i.e. a website, an IM chat box, a social networking site, a video game server. They all come to a common place and interact, much like real life. This is obvious and rarely said, but it's something I think YC has forgotten sometimes. What YC misses is that the community makes up the site. Upon the change to the network system last December, the community was totally torn apart because the regular place that people wanted to come to was taken away from them; rule two kicked in. Hundreds left and their usernames became inactive, leading for rule one to kick in. The site almost died; I was scared it might. But a few loyal people kept it up and running and very slowly YC recuperated and the damage was slowly healed. But we are never going to see the glory days of yore unless we seriously reposition ourselves as a site that people want to be at. And before Jason comes harping in about that uploads are greater than ever, I'm not talking about uploads, I'm talking about hardcore community interaction, which has waned ever since the new site. Currently, I don't come here for the website, hardly. I come here for the people, what few (though growing) number we have; there are some great people here to meet. But for the site itself? Heck, I avoid it if I can, simply because it isn't user-friendly. And besides, compared to other sites out there, this one falls flat technologically by an incredible margin. The network doesn't work as it was intended, and with right reason, because it doesn't work very well. The wiki is in shambles; in fact, it was always in shambles, it was never really top-notch in quality. The forums are quite devoid of any serious discussion these days: one new thread a day tops, often not even that much. Back in the day we had 10-15 a day. How could that happen? YC forgot the community. We were forgotten because the site changed to the point where we didn't want to come back here again. There were not-so-loyal people who were gonna say "Screw this, I'm out" and left. On the technological side of things, it fell apart, and the community followed it right down to the depths. Was this all part of the upgrade to the network? Well, yes, in a way. The vision for the network, as I understood it, would be a social networking site for composers, where they could post music and share pieces, talk to other composers all over the world, and showcase their music. Talk on IM, PM, wall posts, sort of like a hybrid between SibeliusMusic.com and Facebook. Well, that didn't exactly happen. We were required, check that, forced to use the new network thingy and lots of us blew a stink about that. Furthermore, the site was slow, looked incredibly ugly, and wasn't very pleasant with all these new rules and regulations by trident-touting new admins and staff who wanted everyone to obey and bow down. Indeed, it probably wasn't exactly like that but that's what it felt like. I detested the new changes for all those reasons, but more because I had had a past experience with this sort of thing. The reason I detested the network's change so much was because of what happened to SibeliusMusic.com a couple years back. We had a loyal group of people who frequented the forums and we had a small community. The people there would post their pieces on SibeliusMusic through their system with the Scorch plugin and all was fine and dandy. The site wasn't state-of-the-art, but we were ok with that. It was a nice little home. Once Sibelius 5 was released, however, everything changed. The total playback engine of Sibelius was rebuilt and Scorch had to thus be completely rebuilt too. They screwed it up big time because it was new technological territory for them and they weren't exactly thinking ahead a few paces before they released stuff. Then, someone at HQ had the bright idea of redoing the entire SibeliusMusic site. This killed it for most of us. They started a beta, which is the right thing to do, and it was ok. But then they released it to the world and everything broke. The site was slow, it was ugly, it was sometimes not even functional, and it strained the community incredibly. I left, even though I was what you could call a loyal member of that site. The site was just no longer pleasant to be a part of. There were technological problems left and right and it started to deter the promotion of my music, so I took everything off of there and left. Granted, by that time I had set up by own new website and transfered everything onto there, so it was pretty seamless for me, but I was dismayed that I had to leave. What I saw last December was YC going down a similar route. YC, being a much more valuable resource than SibeliusMusic ever was, garnered my loyalty and I kept it this time. However, I won't take it sitting down that YC is being managed by people who don't know what they're doing. The network was designed wrongly from the start, mostly because we didn't really find out what it was like until it was forced on us. A major upgrade like that needs a solid beta stage of AT LEAST six months, but you couldn't do that. The new network was forced on everyone almost right away and it was barely out of an alpha stage testing. At least thats what it seemed like. There was sloppy code, bugs, major errors, bad functionality, ugly design, a whole lot of bad news. I almost left, almost. But I was willing to wait it out and see if you would fix it. Luckly you did, sorta, and very slowly, I might add. BUT, what does the past have to do with where we are? Nothing really, just puts into context of why I feel the way I do and what I want to say about the site now. We have a problem with this site today in that it has an incredible identity crisis. Its not sure what it wants to be. Is it a forum? A social networking site? A place to store music? A youtube? A facebook? A soundclick? etc. etc. Personally, I think its trying to be all of these, and that just doesn't work. The common factor between all successful websites is that they grab (or even create) a community, serve *that* community, and they stick to ONE thing. YouTube has been successful because it has stuck to dealing with videos. It didn't suddenly go off and deal with uploading of PDFs and mp3s. It dealt specifically with videos, and the community associated with videobloggers and their ilk. Facebook has been successful because it focused on social networking and only that. It didn't go off and focus on mail-order bride services or car washes, it was strictly limited to social networking. And that's how it became the largest website in the world. Granted, YC will never be Facebook because its purpose is too focused and its community too small. However, that's not such a bad thing if you do it well. In the grand scheme of things YouTube is a pretty focused site too (though they have branched out a bit); Scribd is even more focused. YC can be a great website being focused on what it is meant to do: serve the community of young composers, plain and simple. It should not be a social networking site, not some place to organize works, not be some place to get information, no, only a place that serves young composers. But wait, aren't all those things a part of serving young composers? Well, yes, but they aren't serving us right now. This "social network" that Mike so desperately tried to create never became that because of technological hurdles. The network was designed poorly from the start and, in my humble opinion, should be completely rethought from top to bottom. It has some good elements to it, now that most of the bugs have been exterminated. However, the implementation of the network, as it stands now, just does not work. I'll stop complaining now and instead offer a grand solution. It, of course, isn't perfect, but is a start to brining this place up to speed with normal websites around the internet. My proposal: to reformat Young Composers in a far more dramatic way than you tried to do the last time and do it right. A lot of what I propose is already here and even working well, it just needs to be altered so the entire site is consistent and working for composers as effectively as possible. See this lovely little chart I made up in Word. It shows a general hierarchy for the site's pages/topics. There's a few holes (such as in instrumentations of reviews) that could easily be filled in and are pretty self-explanatory. Direct link here b.c the big thing is hard to read on the screen: Direct Link to YC Chart As you can see, there's five different subdomains for YC. The homepage would be a completely new page that's designed for easy access to the other parts of YC. Here's a simple sketch: On the left is an "about" box with a short gist of what YC is about, then boxes containing links to the 5 subdomains and short descriptions. The login is on the left. Simple, clean, and efficient. This is the biggest component of what YC is missing, a logical homepage that sends new users to what they need and fast. Every user would have a site-wide profile, not one for wall posts, but one for showing a picture, basic information, and contact info (the most important). These would be accessible from clicking the username for each person. The current "network" would be renamed "Music" and all the compositions would be uploaded there. The current forum would be split into two separate domains, one for reviews and one for everything else. This allows reviewers to clearly have a space designated as their own and that area, not necessarily a forum structure, would probably be similar to the setup we have now. All reviews on specific pieces would go there and people could discuss specific pieces there. Users would upload pieces in the "Music" area at will, and then all of them would automatically be processed and given a tag for review in the "Reviewers" area. The pieces would then be ranked in a hierarchical order of importance of review: pieces that didn't have any reviews after a certain period of time would be bumped up and pieces with many, and quality reviews would be ranked down. Every time there is a review, the composer would be notified in their PM box or by other means of notification if they so desire. The pieces will be sorted into their respective instrumentation "subforums" to help with organization according to their metadata that the user would provide upon upload. This would streamline the Reviewing process for reviewers and eliminate the need for "searching" for pieces to review. (This might be a good opportunity to bring back the "Major Works" forum though that's a whole other animal.) So the Music and Reviewers page would be quite intertwined but exclusive in their purpose. Music would be showcasing music while Reviewing would be reviews OF that music. Then, everything else from the current forums page, from Composer's Headquarters to Off-Topic would go under the "Forum" subdomain. This area would serve as the center of the community and, as such, should get the most attention in that regard. If people want to converse about Beethoven, Atonality, Politics, Religion, Emotocons, or Egg Foo Young, they can all come here. The shoutbox would stay (since its become an integral part of the community), and would probably not change in function (though the functionality would HAVE to change since its hard to work with currently). Discussion should thrive here and people should be able to make connections here. The tutorials would have their own dedicated space and forum. They would be divided into subcategories pertaining to topics and these would be called "Masterclasses." There would be an "Orchestration Masterclass" which would have all the tutorials pertaining to Orchestration grouped together in a coherent manner. They would be written as one big unit rather than haphazard stuff and Teachers would have to collaborate to make it cohesive. The tutorial structure would also be customizable to any particular teacher's demands so that different subjects could have different forms of organization as the Teacher sees fit. These tutorials would also be interactive with exercises and media etc. Finally, the Wiki would be a Wikipedia-esque database of information for composers. This could be derived from the tutorials, from other internet sites, personal research, anything reliable. This database would be geared towards composers, young composers who need quick reference material of the ranges of instruments, musical definitions, form examples, pieces of a particular composer, or other bits of information useful to composers. This wiki would be a great resource for the community. All the pages should have a similar "style" but each should probably have a different color scheme to differentiate them. I would even make the colors of the staff members' names match up with these color schemes. OR, they could all be the same color and be customizable as to the color scheme according to the user. This is up to how customizable to community wants it. The entire site would have a "Web 3.0" feel where most everything would be movable according to the user. This is inspired by YouTube's "movable boxes" where all the "widgets" or "modules" are movable according to the user's fancy. I think each user's dashboard page (the page with all the latest news and updated content) should have this feature. Users should be able to customize their profiles (to a point; we don't want this to become Myspace :) ). In regard to staff, there would be individual staff members for each section of the site. The music page may have staff but if its completely automated, little human interaction will be necessary. The Reviews page would have, obviously, Reviewers. The Forum page would have Moderators. The Tutorials page would have Teachers. The Wiki page would have Editors. This is much like the scheme we have now except Moderators do not trump everyone else. They will be exclusive to the forum. The Administrators will have control over the entire site and be responsible for site-wide operations and Staff appointments. Notice that a huge chunk of this already exists, its just not cohesive. That's what makes a great site, having quality content put in a cohesive and logical setting. It is a grand scheme and obviously couldn't be implemented all at once. But given time, energy, some proper developers, and some input from the community, this place could REALLY soar as an amazing resource for composers on the internet. All we have to do is try and make it amazing! Lets work together to create something great and use our common passion for Music for the better! :)