ThaSauce’s One Hour Compos Every Thursday @ 9 PM EST


With the excitement of MAGFest winding down, we would like to make a formal reminder that ThaSauce holds a weekly compo every Thursday at 6 PM PST/9 EST by none other than our very own resident awesome lady, starla. We cannot stress enough that these compos are for everybody; the goal of One Hour Compos is to improve songwriting skills with these weekly hourly exercises as everyone is encouraged to participate and bring friends. Discussion is held in on irc.esper.net during the compo, but we also listen to the completed songs as a group. If you do not wish to participate in the chat, you may still submit a song via the website.

“Well… what in the world is a compo?”

Compo is a slang word for “composition competition” commonly used by the arrangement community. It is derived from the demoscene competitions by the same name. Contrary to this, compos are less of a competition and more of an exercise in composition abilities. Each compo has it’s own unique format and guidelines and while some are as short as 1 hour, others can last anywhere from a month, to a few months. It’s important to remember that the primary purpose of compos are to hone your skills and abilities by working within, sometimes very constricting, guidelines. These techniques have proven essential to the growth of countless musicians.

A (very) brief history of compos as related to ThaSauce

There has always been a need for musicians in our community to gather and practice. Even before our community, trackers arranged compos of their own and created tiny limited-sample MOD files with amazing results. Composition and technique has always been a priority in compos over wowing people with instrumentation. With so many random compos across communities, it was always a bit difficult knowing when they were, where they were and if they were actually going on. Once we got everyone in the right place, normally an IRC channel, we would write a song either based on a theme, free for all or maybe even remix based on a provided source tune.  Once completed, we would email all the results to a participant that had webspace who would archive the compo and host it for download, then participants would have to manually download the compo pack and finally listen to them in order. We would do this often in with a group of motivated musicians, eager to hone their skill.

The creative progression of ThaSauce’s One Hour Compo, as told by starla:

“As always I do what I do out of passion. I don’t mean to nag or annoy. I encourage others to reach their full potential, and to stop putting off to tomorrow what you can start today. You can’t wake up one day and be an accomplished musician without taking that first step and starting on your journey.”

One Hour Compo is typically an “all gear” compo, which means you can use any instruments at your disposal, as long as you submit an mp3 at the end.  OHC is also themed: more often than not a text theme is provided, from time to time a picture or other media can be used to stimulate the artists’ creativity. All in all, One Hours Compos really attempts to push you as a musician, as the time constraint forces people to work outside of their comfort zone and come up with new streamlined processes that ultimately come to benefit their musicianship. 171 compos later, we are still going strong. Please come join us tomorrow in an effort to challenge yourself as a musician or even to just preview what ThaSauce’s OHC can offer — we will definitely welcome you with open arms.