RE: POV - Ariana Grande (Cover by Melitza) - VIBES Week 13 [ENG-ESP]

Hello. I will take over the conversation from now on due to all the disrespect directed towards @melitzamusic. I will not tolerate this because I was the one who brought Melitza to Vibes, I did not bring her here to be treated as ungrateful and a beggar when she has never been that way and even less to denigrate her opinion and her work. With the recent news that a participant has been disqualified for cheating in the system in the very way we criticized and named, I will even less tolerate any negative portrayal of @melitzamusic. It was never a personal attack; it was a critique of the system because we saw the door to do the kind of things for which this week's participant was disqualified. This text will be a bit long, but it is very important for us to defend our honor and professionalism. We had considered leaving since we don’t feel welcome here, but I don’t want to disappear from this community without clarifying anything. Our reputation is valuable wherever we are, and I feel we have been treated in a demeaning manner. If we are not welcome after this text, we will accept it and write our farewell, but I will express everything with respect and hope for consideration and respect from everyone.

I’ll be straightforward. We are not Mother Teresa but this was never just about money. Melitza has 17 years in music, and I have 15 years, both professionals with degrees in our field. We are legally qualified and authorized to do what we do, with years of experience in the music labor market in our country’s capital. She as a singer and educator, and I as a music producer and engineer. Our investment in equipment and knowledge exceeds what is earned for first place by more than 40 times. And we are not rich people either, not at all, I wish. We have achieved everything with a lot of effort and work in music; it’s the only thing we’ve worked on throughout our lives. So we are not beggars or bums waiting to perform for @lordbutterfly and get paid. It’s not like that, and honestly, after all the disrespect, it would be disgusting to do that.

Since last year, we decided to focus on creating content for various social networks. On Hive, we saw the opportunity to reach more audiences, and we’ve been here ever since. The result was successful; we’ve received messages from people in distant places like China, Africa, the United States, and Europe. We’ve also received many messages from fellow Venezuelans like us, and we appreciate all of them. Thanks to the content we’ve been creating here, we’ve gained new followers both on this platform and other social media channels.

Furthermore, when we read the description of Vibes, we understood that the competition was about striving for musical excellence. Melitza has never been competitive toward anyone other than herself. She doesn't like to compete with other people; instead, she only seeks to improve day by day and if she can help someone else to improve she does it, she is extremely grateful and in all her publications you can notice it, she always leaves thanks and tries to answer to all the people that with good intentions leave her a message about her participations.

I brought Melitza to Vibes because I believed it would be good practice for her and help her connect with other musicians while earning a bit of money. We never expected to receive the votes we’ve gotten; our goal was never to set up another studio with the earnings here. Our country is currently quite expensive, so living off Hive is not an option at all. Still, we appreciate the votes, they were beyond our expectations with which we entered the community. I also want to clarify that our aim has never been to reach the top 3 every week; that would be unfair to the community and very unlikely to happen. It’s been 13 weeks, and this is the first time we’ve publicly expressed concerns. As professionals, we have the basis to have doubts about what happened. Before I present our defense, I want to emphasize that what I’m about to say isn’t about humility or arrogance—but to let you know what we went through, put yourself in our shoes and understand why we ended up writing this post. Unfortunately, it was taken in a bad way and in a personal way when it was never written with that intention. The idea was to correct to make this a fairer place.

In the Twitter Space, we heard BOTH JUDGES say that this performance qualified for first place. Let me share some insights: “Stone Cold” is an extremely complex song in terms of vocal technique, interpretation, mixing, and mastering. It took three days to achieve the result of the recording we uploaded here. The song was recorded in a single take from start to finish—without dubbing, without modifying her voice, without rip-offs (I am not going to criticize the people who dub, but I will mention that there have been participants who won in other weeks and have dubbed—I know for a fact, I’m an audio recording and mixing engineer).

I was in front of her recording everything, and she didn’t use falsetto for the final part of the song. She was belting and using her voice to its fullest capacity—it's not easy at all. Achieving the different dynamics heard throughout the entire song is also challenging. I invite anyone to try it and experience firsthand how difficult this song is. So, from that perspective, we’re talking about a very demanding performance.

To be able to transmit with that song and not sound soulless is a job on its own—you have to be deeply involved. Even though we removed that part from the video, Melitza ended up crying during that recording; it’s not easy.

On the other hand, if I were to show you a picture from the session… Recording and delivering the result we submitted for the competition with that volume and dynamic range of -6 LUFS (within the current commercial range) in a master, crystal clear, maintaining all the naturalness of Meli’s voice and performance—without a nasty distortion and without the compressors controlling the recording’s dynamic range overcompressing the final result—Is not easy at all. We had to automate signal gain section by section, even down to specific words, to avoid overcompression or distortion due to the recording’s extreme dynamics. This challenge is evident in the live studio version recorded by Demi Lovato, which has 51 million views. In that official version, you can hear the compressors struggling with the amount of signal they’re receiving. We wanted to do something in our own style, reflecting our personalities, and without the issues we heard in official versions. I can confidently say that both of us were fully satisfied with our performance; we achieved what we wanted to convey.

Having heard the judges’ comments and knowing everything we put into that performance, it seemed that what kept us out of the top 6 were the audience votes, as mentioned by the judges. They said we needed to be a “pain in the ass” and gather as many people as possible to vote for us—that would be the way to secure a spot. Honestly, the choice of words wasn’t the best, and we did not like it at all. I feel that being a pain in the ass is quite unpleasant and is not part of our personality, so we say that being a pain in the ass for us is harassing our audience and our loved ones, it is something we do not like. Actually, I don't know with what connotation @lordbutterfly took it to take that attitude with us but I would like to think that being from different cultures affects in the context of the words and that his totally disproportionate and out of control response is due to that, as well as maybe for him being a "pain in the ass" might not be a big deal but to us it seems disrespectful. We haven’t launched any personal attacks against anyone; our frustration stems from a system that needs improvement for the benefit of all, out of respect for each participant’s artistic work.

What disappointed us wasn’t the lack of winning money, but rather that all the effort and work we put in went unrecognized on the podium. That result, which could compete with any official version online, ended up outside the top ranks in a competition that claims to seek musical excellence. It wasn’t due to the judges (or so we thought), because they stated that our performance qualified for first place. It also wasn’t due to the audience, as they left beautiful comments on the post. Instead, it was because we didn’t garner enough votes in a poll.

So, we decided to analyze what we had done differently from the others to not get similar votes to them in the poll. During this analysis, we noticed posts with fewer views than votes and very few comments (real interactions). That’s when we felt a greater sense of injustice and decided to write this post.

I’ll emphasize it again: I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my words. This isn’t about humility or arrogance. All the explanation I have given in this comment and the one we gave in the post, plus the results seen in Melitza's participations show that there are many things to take into account in a performance like the ones we usually bring to the competition, it is not only singing on top of a harmonic progression. Even the selection of colors, lighting, and post-production color grading in the video matters to us. Videos don’t automatically look that way; that also takes some work. But I won’t delve further into this topic.

Now, if none of what I’ve written is taken into account for the competition, and if the evaluation process follows a different method, it would have been good to know. For instance, perhaps singing about religion holds more value for you than anything I mentioned, or maybe you prefer performances shot with the front camera of a phone, excluding everything we do in our videos. These aspects remain unclear, and perhaps they contributed to our exclusion from the rankings—I don’t know, and I don’t want to assume anything.

If these matters can be clarified respectfully, and if we can treat each other as adults, then fine. If you don't like what I write, communicate it respectfully, and we’ll leave the community.

We’re grateful to everyone who has supported and commented on Melitza’s videos. Both of us appreciate it greatly. Each performance involves a lot of work, and receiving positive feedback from all of you is truly beautiful and satisfying.

@jessicaossom @anesi @gnericvibes @hopestylist @langegaming @yisusth @oswaldotorres @ovey10 @fjcalduch @stickupboys @mobbs @bobbydones @sekani @minuetoacademy @meyateingi @isbelhiv02 @capitandelbam

To all of you, who are the most recurrent, thank you very much from the bottom of our hearts. You’ve made our time on Hive even more special than we expected when we started this journey. And to everyone else we haven’t mentioned but know has been there, we’re incredibly grateful that you take the time to watch the videos. We understand that time is the most precious asset for everyone, and dedicating minutes to watch the video and additional time to leave a comment means the world to us.