How do I organize a Rock Band Tournament?

[afrony17]

Help me out. Any Ideas on how to organize a rock band tournament? scoring methods, song choices for the tournament?

[AmpRack]

I've been running a tournament for almost a year now, and helping out for another year before that. Everyone does it differently though, so I can only tell you how we run it and leave it at that.

Once a month (on a fairly consistent schedule), we play from 8pm to 2am. From 9 to about midnight is that actual tournament, with all other time being freeplay. Bands sign up from 8 to 9, then each band plays 1 song a piece for 3 rounds (sometimes 4, time permitting). Scores are added up, then the top 2 bands go head-to-head for a last round. The kicker is we make it some strange challenge, to either make the game more difficult, or to force bands to play songs they normally wouldnt play. The winner of this is winner overall, the tournament is over, and back to freeplay.

As far as scoring, it can be as easy or as complicated as you want to make it. I know the guys in Denver have a straight-forward system (check out this page, YRDaddy runs things in Denver so he's a good person to ask about this too.). We're changing our formula around, but it takes into account almost everything. It looks mostly like this:

(Player#Score = (PlayerPercentage + (InstrumentDifficulty x 25)) x PlayerDifficulty)
(BandScore = (Player1Score + Player2Score + Player3Score + Player4Score) + (BandDifficulty x 150))

It looks like a mess, but it's not. Each player can get a maximum score of 1000 points (assuming they get 100% playing expert, and the difficulty for that person's instrument is 6-dots). All 4 player scores are added together. The band difficulty bonus is added to the player score, and the final maximum total is 4900pts. Again, it sounds messy but we have a spreadsheet that does all the work for us. If this is something you're interested in, I can send you a copy.

As far as doing song choices, that's going to depend more on your setting and what you really want to do with it. For us, we have 700+ songs available, but we also keep printed karaoke-style books with all the necessary info. That way, people can look through to see if we have a song, and then if they want to play it BEFORE they go up there and stand there looking through the songlist. Assuming you have RB3, there's a ton of options with the filters that you can pare down the list a bit to whatever you'd like.

Feel free to ask anything else. I'd be glad to help.

[afrony17]

yes, i would love a copy of the spreadsheet you guys use.

thank you for your time, you have been extremely helpful.

e-mail me at: fernandeza_91@yahoo.com

[AmpRack]

Emailed.

[Viper-619]

Can i also get a copy of the spreadsheet. I'm also interested markfriel619@hotmail.com thanks!

[AmpRack]

Sent. Also, sent a new version to afrony that should be a bit more accurate.

[Viper-619]

Thanks, much appreciated.

[Joek00L]

I would greatly appreciate a copy...I'm running a charity event tournament tonight and this would make it so much easier. Thank you ahead of time...and if you don't see this in time thank you anyway! Jsalonis@gmail.com

Joe

[AmpRack]

Sent!

[spd]

wow this sounds like a great and easy system. may i also have a copy? martez_spd@yahoo.com