Q: How did you compile this list? How did you rate the music?
A: Even though this was a list of my favorite albums, I felt it was not only necessary but top priority to be true to myself and my opinion... and not get entirely wrapped up in what other people believe to be the (quote... unquote) best albums.
Understandably, personal opinion isn't the easiest thing to measure.
(It's fkking hard, and time consuming.)
So I just re-listened to all the albums that I pick up from 2009.
Kicked back with my laptop and my iTunes library...
And one by one, I rated them. And not by a 5-star system like iTunes offers, conveniently.
But an additional 6-star.
Many will consider this, just simply... stupid. Unsmart.
And at times, I think the same.
But I felt the only way to describe a quality of a track was through 6-stars.
For example:
(As seen above) is my rating of Discovery - LP.
The iTunes rating system allows me up to 5-stars (obviously lol).
But when I thought about it, 5-stars just didn't do enough justice to the best of songs.
So to mark a 6-star track (for evaluation purposes), I just uncheck the box to the left of the track title.
The best way of describing this theory is through a simplification of the scale and its correlation with "skipping":
6-star: Never skip this track. And in many occasions, I skip songs to get "here".
5-star: Great song. Rarely skip.
4-star: (If I'm listening to the whole album, usually won't skip.) The song is alright. Nothing outstanding.
3-star: Skippable track. Usually is skipped, unless I'm not paying attention. Haha.
2-star: (WTF is this?) Always skipped.
1-star: This never happens. I don't listen to complete trash [alternative rock]. (Delete)
------------------------------
After I rate the whole album.
I added it all up. Divide by number of total tracks (some times excluding short interlude or intro tracks that are just unrateable.)
From there, you get a number __ out of 6.
Some final ratings, tied with other albums. So in that situation (which happened a lot)...
I just counted up 6-star tracks.
Example: Discovery - LP [4.5 out of 6] (1 track)
...And that's how.
------------------------------
Q: Why did this post come more than a month late? [It ain't 2009 anymore, dumbass.]
A: It was a little bit of bad planning, with a side of burning myself out with work.
And like I stated prior...
1. I had to go back and find every album that I got this year.
(I missed a couple, down the long run. So I went back and corrected this.)
2. Decipher which one's came out in 2009.
3. Listen to it mostly all the way through. (Some tracks were obvious 5 and 6-star tracks to me.)
4. Listen to particular tracks over and over again. (My attention strayed off a lot, especially in the late hours.)
5. Calculate.
6. And then I found myself extending the list, because I felt like a list of 10 was enough (in proportion to the music I listened to in '09), or a list of 15... And then it became a list of 20. Et cetera, et cetera.
The Top 2009 list is officially 30, with a set of 9 Honorable Mentions.
-After opening up the list to (technically) 39, I did a lot of visual refining for the layout of this list on Illustrator. And hours of fine tuning, frustration, a little bit of learning and relearning the program, saving of multiple files over multiple programs...
I just didn't plan this out properly, with all consideration.
Looking back, the only way that this could have been released (lets say) mid-December...
...was if I starting this whole entire project in October.
(Which in turn, would have taken many albums that were released late 2009 out of consideration.)
[With all that being said... I'm almost entirely happy about the final product and its tardiness.]
------------------------------
This concludes the introduction.
Have fun.
///
No comments:
Post a Comment