I don't want people to have to do this. I'm ditching the EQ theme. I'm sure it will be looked upon favorably but it's not required - too limiting.
Also considering maybe a panel of pals for judges.
Glitter of course because she's a saint. Definitely gotta get Colgate on the panel since he's usually at a music festival when he's not on EQ. Yulath should be there to make sure the track is hot enough for hell, but he may be entering so I dunno. Should probably get Gongshow and Letsjoe on there for the jam appreciation. Weta should be involved too to bring in another member of the Faygo constituency.
As far as recording goes - when I did a small amount of recording and editing years ago, I used Adobe Audition. I found it to be a mostly intuitive program as a tech savvy beginner and was able to figure out just about everything with google. I pirated it but you could probably use it legit real cheap if it's included in one of those Adobe online subscriptions. I plug my electric guitar into my computer using a Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum Pro card and front-of-computer hub that includes 1/4 inch jacks. Native Instruments Guitar Rig is great for real time effects and it can be used within Adobe Audition to process effects. Guitar Rig makes me sound WAY better than I am on guitar. I figured out how to record stuff at half speed and speed it up to normal to preserve the pitch which also made me sound way better than I was when I was recording stuff 6-8 years ago. Here's a few examples.
The opening to Megaman 3 Suite I arranged for 2 electric guitars, bass, and drums. I found a utility on the internet that would convert midi files to shitty wav files - I used those for the bass and drums on this clip -
http://www.msu.edu/~oconne53/gay.mp3
On this little Zelda clip you can really hear the benefits of the speed up effect - there was no way I could play that backing part full speed 6 years ago; I maybe could now -
http://www.msu.edu/~oconne53/arps.mp3
Same here for this little Megaman 3 Boss Intro music clip. There's no way I could have played this full speed -
http://www.msu.edu/~oconne53/quick.mp3
Audition is a pretty sweet program. Give it a try if you're looking for something to do this competition.