no, i almost forgot about it, but it’s on its way right now as i am typing.
thanks for the reminder in the bb4 thread! =)
I pretty much finished my Beat Battle entry in two days, which is really fast for me. I tweaked the mix a bit on the third day. And now it’s been resting for a while so I can work some more on it with fresh ears. I might add some small variations but it’s very very close to being finished.
The longest time I have worked on a track was one that I had worked on a few months and thought I was finished… I even started to print copies of the cd-r single, but I realized I wasn’t entirely happy with it… Let it rest for maybe 4-5 months before I finally finished it. It was tough, but now I’m happy with it, and some english zine had it on it’s top ten singles of the year. 
I’ve decided to experiment with “slow patient tracking” and persevere with my BB song - to see the benefits if the results of taking my time… It takes a lot longer to get things right when you can’t just throw in any instrument/effect that sounds great! Mixing is harder as well - trying to get good sound quality out of samples, native Renoise effects, and no luxury of fixing your EQ problems after a render.
A great sound is not impossible, but they DO take a lot longer when you’re limited production-wise. My standards have clearly changed since the tracker days, as I never really cared about production quality years ago like I do now, I’m finding that simply getting the sound right is taking 90% of my time! As a consequence, I think my music is suffering. I actually completely slaughtered the personality of my track at one stage.
Even with limitations of the BB rules, it’s still possible to have great sound, even if very hard. If you think perfection is in reach, you tend to try and reach for it, but perfection is an invisible and subjective line, so perhaps this idea of focusing on and fixing perceived imperfections is a waste of mental energy. If I were this pedantic about my sound 5-15 years ago (mod/xm/s3m/it files), I’d never have accomplished anything!
It’s been a really interesting learning experience and we should have scaled down versions of these sort of compos more often! I have so much to learn.
Yes, it’s similar to me (related to all other things than the compose / arrange part.)
Years before, I never thought about all this special mixing, post production and mastering stuff. I took a good sample and ready for take off! It was much more enjoyable to make some tracks because you only thought in the creative sense of entering notes… But today, I like to have a professional touch in the end and this is more difficult, if you try some very special music styles together. Sometimes a track(channel) is too loud, wide in stereo, too much compressed or in worst case: it should not be in the whole song!
That’s very annoying when you have 24 channels together and you try to mix and compare to other (e.g. commercial) songs… and mix and compare… That can be very boring and waste far too much time. 
I remember a day, when I tried to remix an Impulse Tracker song from the classic Unreal Tournament PC game. It was not my song, but one of my favorites so I wish to have it in new soundquality. So I rendered all the single tracks and tried a remastering… but making it better without to sacrifice the old sound can be a very time consuming task. 
Ok, because of the restrictions in the battle, there is no room for all this special mixing stuff after the track creation. So I hope the judges look more for the creative part than the perfect mix…
Perhaps you only have to know which kind of music the renoise developers like… and compose something similar (Of course in the borders of the topic “cold winter”). And in combination with the full potential of all possible trackFX and so on you can show: you are the one who can decide about a great feature in the future renoise development. 
Robbson.
Some very good points here, especially this one I think…
“A column of bongo drums. Might give your percussion a little extra groove. If you listen to it 150 times, you are going to tweak it down to 75% volume, and then less and less. Because you are sick of it, you become unrealistically hypercritical. So as time goes on, you are slowly stripping the character away; chiseling away; removing all the pointy edges - because you think that it’s going to offend your listener like it’s offending you. What I am trying to say that you are unavoidably increasing the rift between how you are listening to a peice of music, and how it’s going to be perceived, by tweaking.”
The fastest I’ve ever written a track to release quality in one sitting is 12 hours. Most of my tracks take closer to 30 hours from start to finish, so 1 - 3 months when that time is spread out over work and gaming and other stuff.
So yeah 2-3 weeks is a bit of a rush in one sense because I’ve got to fit those 30 hours in around the rest of my life somehow, and ‘free time’ does not always equal ‘quality creative time’. But at the same time I like a deadline that long because it pushes me to work on my track and keeps within my “getting bored now!” time frame for most tracks 
Don’t worry about mixing quality. Ofcourse, i’m wearing headphones at first, so just mix it down that anyone’s ears will be spared an unexpected impact of hearing imparement, the rest will become alright.
Don’t try to favor the dev-team, the team judges will be a collection of interested people with some good musical and tracking experience which do not nesessarily exist out of Renoise team-members.
So don’t try to impress the devs with their favorite style as it won’t do you any good but neither the competition.
Just listen to the BB1 to 3 examples, there are lots of different styles in there that makes the collection interesting.
It wouldn’t be if all songs sound the same.
I’m already glad Renoise has so many tricks that can be pulled from it sleeves that a lot of users creatively use to their benefit and thus create the variation that also makes every song surprising.
It makes judging a lot more interesting.