The Crate Digger Death-match starts today. We’ve had some good online press over the end of the week and filled up all 12 spots with ease. The 12 entrants are Doctor Popular, TradeMark G., Tanner, Bomarr, nYgel, Antisocial, D-Form, DJ Snyder, Snake Eyes, Fernando Filgueira, Larry Legend, and Tyler Stickley.

Z. has sent out his last minute list of motifs, which was a short list of rules announced at the last minute to keep anyone from starting the project early. These rules included buying at least one item made in the 80s, having one song where the main sample is played backwards, and each album must have at least one country or disco song.

Whenever I would explain the contest to someone they seemed to love the idea, but not quite understand a certain part of it. For instance, when I would say $12 was the most you could spend on the items you sampled your music from, many folks didn’t understand that we weren’t counting the editing equipment (tape decks, record players, computers, etc) as part of that charge.

I think the press we’ve seen online has been great, it proves the story has “legs”, but it would be nice to get more print media or even do some interviews as well. I liked the blurb in Thursday’s S.F. Chronicle that referred to the event as a bit of MacGyver with a pinch of Iron Chef. All the blog coverage has been very positive, but it seems like people leaving comments either get the challenge or they don’t. I’m hoping that we can keep the press coming in and average 400 new unique visitors a day during the online judging phase. Hopefully this won’t only be a fun challenge for each producer, but may also gain them new audiences.

Personally, my plan for the CDD is to get my shopping done by 11am, then get home and start by noon. I haven’t picked out my thrift store yet, but I’ll probably stick with buying cds if possible. In terms of production, I see myself spending the first 3 hours sampling sounds and chopping up my drum kits, before I even start my first song. Ideally, I’d like to take a crack at several producing styles including very simple splicing and mixing together of verses and choruses, but mostly I’ll be creating totally new songs out of kits I create. Unfortunately, I’ll be missing Self Edge’s Super Future party unless I want to sacrifice a couple hours of production time.