We rather enjoy all the unique and weird sounds people record using Splice. We get everything from secret confessions to shower singers to Spanish lessons and even occasionally some music. We thought we’d encourage this with a new contest. Here is how it’s going to work:

Part One: Tell Us Who You Are

1. Record yourself saying your name. It can be your username, if you’d rather not people know your real name. Use an ultra-fabulous superhero name if you want. Just remember that Kenny Reynolds is already taken.

2. Tag your name recording with “MYNAME.”

Part Two: Meet Your Neighbors

1. Ready to make some music? Search for other sounds tagged with MYNAME and create a song using the name of at least five of your fellow Splicers. (Really though, the more the merrier. This contest is about meeting new people.)

3. Tag your finished song with “NAMEGAME”.

4. Your finished song does NOT have to include the loop you made yourself, but if you didn’t contribute a name to the pool, you will not be eligible to win.

The Goodies

The winner will be judged based upon how many other users have marked it as a favorite. If your song has been favorited the most, you will be receiving a VS3251 Powered Audio System from Altec Lansing, so you can crank it up and bask in your own glory.

The winner will be decided at Midnight CST, Sunday October 7th, so finish early and bring your friends to cheer you on!

We’ve got a winner for the Your Voice, Your Choice contest. Actually, we’ve had a winner for a little while, but I wanted to be able to post the entry here in the blog and couldn’t do so until our mp3s were back up and running, as they are now. As always, we had some really fun entries, but what’s new this time is that I don’t have to struggle with picking a winner this time! Thanks to the wonder of functional ratings, you guys got to to the hardest part for me and I have been happily demoted to ‘just the messenger.’ Yay!

Therefore, I am pleased to announce that our winner this time around is toddnrgi, for this song:

Todd is going to get a beautiful new surround sound system from Altec Lansing, who graciously continues to sponsor our contests and encourage great music everywhere.

Be sure to hear our runners up, too:

You can listen to all the contest entries here.

Thanks again to everyone for participating in this! If your favorite didn’t win, be sure to bring some friends to help vote next time around. We’ll have the next contest up shortly!

Like always, there were a lot of entries for the TTP Project contest. Actually, probably because his loops are so awesome, there were even more than usual, to be honest. I love when that happens. When I was listening to the entries for this one, there was one song that really stood out to me, and that’s our winner this time. I really took notice of it because for one, it’s totally different from all the other songs. It’s a little funky and chill, and I really dig the vibe going on with it. Also, when I opened it up to check to see if it met all the requirements, I saw that the person who remixed the song not only used the required contest loops, they created the other half of the song themselves, probably exactly for this contest. I love when that happens even more. That’s the idea with Splice - to let someone else inspire you to get moving and participate, right up to the point where you’re making music that inspires the next guy.

So, to that I say, “Good work, Eggman! You win!” This makes me happy, as Eggman is a regular contest entrant and his entries are always good. As always, Altec Lansing is our super awesome sponsor and will be mailing you out a VS3251 Powered Audio System. Rock on.

Again, I really want to thank the TTP Project for being such a great participant in the site and sharing such wonderful music with everyone. And, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you skipped over the rest of the contest entries, as they are all really worth listening to. You guys are getting good at this!!

Ahhh… the illustrious cowbell. You have to appreciate an instrument that has such a long and varied history. Originally used to track various animals as they wandered in herds, the cowbell can be found in all kinds of music, from classical to latin to rock. In the 80s, when the Roland TR-808 drum machine put in it’s less-than-realistic cowbell sound, the instrument became widely used in pop and hip-hop songs. And naturally, most people have seen the Saturday Night Live skit that makes fun of the Blue Oyster Cult.

We love the cowbell, and we know you do, too. So, this week, we want MORE.

1. Make a song in Splice that uses a cowbell sample. (There are a lot of good samples in Splice already, but you are naturally welcome to bring your own cowbell.)
2. Tag your song with MORECOWBELL to be automatically entered to win.

Entries are due by Midnight CST on May 27th, 2007.

Normally when I blog contest winners, I tell you that I had a really hard time deciding who won. But in the case of the Dance Off, I hardly had to think about it at all. I mean, I listened to all of the songs and some of them were pretty good, but there was one that was muy muy bien and nothing really compared to it. This should come as no suprise, as this person never fails to make dance songs that get you moving and bouncing around.

This guy has been a neverending fount of help, patience and inspiration since we very first started here, and he does it out of the goodness of his heart and his love of people and music. He’s the real heart and soul of this site, so I know that everybody here will be happy to join me in congratulating none other than Riggy McRiggerton himself, as we proclaim him this week’s winner and an all around great musician. The prize this week, a rocking set of FX5051 Speakers from our lovely sponsors, Altec Lansing, will be sent shortly.

Now, listen to this and tell me it doesn’t make you boogie:

Great work, Rig! Thanks for everything!!!!

Purge is such a great song that every entry in the contest was really good. I know you’ve all been waiting to hear who won, and so, without further ado, here we go:

Lotusfae is an extra cool Splicer. Her musical ambitions, in her own words are “To get it all out. To show people the fantastic music I hear in my mind but I have yet to find a way to tap into. To be EXACTLY like Laura Veirs. To quit trying to write songs with the pretext that people have to like them.”

And you know what? I can get behind that. I can also get behind her remix. The use of the chanting in there is really effective. So, congratulations! Altec Lansing will be sending you some wireless headphones shortly. (Fartlord tells me his are really awesome, by the way.) A big thanks to JordanEspionage and his band Common Man Down for volunteering their music. Be sure to go listen to the runners up, too. They were all really excellent.

We like friendly and musical people here at Splice. One such person is thettpproject. Another user pointed him out to me as being extra helpful and having a page full of fabulous sounds to share. What better reason to put him in the hotseat and remix his music for this week’s contest?

The rules are easy:
1. Splice together a song using at least 3 of the sounds by thettpproject. You can make a song from scratch, or remix one that he’s already made.
2. Tag your song with remixTTP to be automatically entered to win!
3. Entries are due by Midnight CST, Sunday May 20th, 2007.

The winner will receive a VS3251 Powered Audio System from our ever gracious sponsor, Altec Lansing.

If you need a little help getting inspired, you should listen to this song. As Fenix aptly said, “…it sounds like music from a ‘Matrix’ fight scene.”

Extra appreciation goes to thettpproject for sharing his music with us. Be sure to stop by his page and say hello and thank you!

I am very proud of what an international staff we have at Splice, and when I’m working out of my house in Chicago and not our office in Spain, I am always severely jealous of the weather reports I get from the team. I clearly remember a day in March when someone over there told me that there were people swimming in the ocean already, and I was amazed and jealous because we had at least several inches of snow here still. And with so many of our business contacts being in San Francisco, the weather from the other direction is usually warmer, too!

Chicago is finally thawing out, though, and the weather here has been phenomenal this week. The sun has been shining, there is a vase of fresh flowers from the garden on my desk, and there are rumors of a cicada invasion in just a couple of weeks. But the best part is the music! People everywhere are driving around with their windows down, blaring the radio, and the clubs are packed full of people who have been hibernating until now.

Summertime is when most people I know dust off their CD collection and start pulling out the happiest party music and really get down. It seems like a good time to do this at Splice, too, so this week, the contest is dedicated to summertime dances and happy times. You guys as a whole have improved drastically at making songs since last summer, so let’s put those skills to work and make some feel-good songs that are great for the summer.

The rules are very simple this time:
1. Create a dance song in Splice. It doesn’t have to be any special kind of dance - just whatever gets your feet moving!
2. Tag your song with DANCEOFF to be automatically entered to win.

Entries will be judged based off their grooviness factor and how hard it is to sit still while listening. Submit yours by Sunday night, May 13th, Midnight CST.

Remember - DO NOT use copyrighted music in your songs, or they will be automatically disqualified and the offending samples deleted!

Airtone never ceases to amaze me in the way he can take nearly any sample out there and do something different and beautiful with it, so I’m happy to announce him as our winner in the Remix Groovebox contest. Even Groovebox agreed that it was some very clever arranging.

Once again, our super cool sponser Altec Lansing is going to send Airtone an IM9 audio system. Great work to everyone who entered this contest and thanks again to Groove box for taking the hotseat for a week!

It’s springtime and the sun is shining here in Chicago and everyone I know is doing a little Spring Cleaning. On Splice, we’ve been hustling hard to tidy up loose ends on the upcoming release, and I can tell everyone here is excited to be preparing for it’s launch. It’s seems like such a short time ago that we launched our initial release, and I’m still amazed at how we’ve grown. I found an email the other day where I was reporting to someone that we “already have 318 users!” Hahaaaa! We’ve grown tremendously since we’ve been here, because our users keep bringing great content which inspires other people.

Someone who has been with us for a very long time is jordanespionage. You have probably seen his work on the site, and he was kind enough to let us do a feature about him which you can read here. Jordan has a band called Common Man Down, and I’ve been enjoying their take on industrial. I mentioned to Jordan that the samples he’s been uploading to Splice are really great, and he offered to let us remix a Common Man Down song for a contest. He went through for us and split up their song Purge into tasty bite-sized morsels, and you can find the Splice version of it here:

You can hear the complete version of this song on the Common Man Down myspace page.

We’d love to hear your version. Here are the rules:

1. Remix Purge using the Splice sequencer. Your remix can be any flavor you like. (That’s the point, after all, isn’t it?)
2. Your remix must contain at least three of the sounds from the original.
3. Tag your remix with “REMIXPURGE” to be automatically entered.

Entries are due in by Midnight CST, Sunday April 29th, 2007.

Special thanks to Common Man Down for sharing their sounds with Splice. Be sure to drop by the Common Man Down myspace page to hear the full version of Purge and, of course, to tell them thank you.