Entertainer Archive

I'm sure someone has to have posted an idea like this before, but I thought I'd offer it up as a suggestion anyhow. Like probably most entertainers, I like playing "songs" with the flourishes, and I find the easiest way is to have a repetitive pattern with variations - people who are paying attention can get into the groove, and it's a lot of fun if there's a few instruments playing together. It can be hard, though, to get everyone sort of on the same page. I'm also - in real life - a (very!) amateur musician, and it occurred to me that the blues might translate to SWG - sort of.

A lot of you probably know the standard 12-bar blues form: I-IV-I-I, IV-IV-I-I, V-IV-I-V. So but my thought was to just substitute flourishes for the chord changes. So maybe "Naboo Blues" has flourish 1 as the I, flourish 7 as the IV, and flourish 8 as the V. It's a relatively simple pattern but sounds pretty cool if you can get several different players on the same groove.

Also, assuming you don't use the same flourish for two "chords", there are 8x7x6=336 variations per song. Which is a lot of variety.

For coordinating all the band members you can use bandflourish instead of flourish. The person doing the bandflourish is the only one who gets experience so its tougher to get novices to do it than masters but it provides a lot of power. The command can also be directed at different instruments so you can do "/bandflourish 3"and get everyone to play flourish 3 or you can do "/bandflourish 3 fizz" and get only the fizz players to do flourish 3.

To me Starwars 3 is the bluesiest sounding of the songs. I recently wrote words to go with a flourish set titled "Blue Glue Blues" where I lament about not being able to find the blue rug glue for my ladies desired blue rug. It is pretty funny and a lot of fun to perform.

We effectively do the same thing with flo sets in classical forms such as sonata form, rondo, etc., e.g. abcba where a, b, c are Talus Moon defined flo sets. We don't use the bandflourish commands deliberately. Excerpt from my Talus Moon band guide:

Pre-requisites
The first step to successful band playing in this style is to learn your flourishes and animations for all instruments that you will be playing in the band. This is a useful skill not only for routines, but great if you are just jamming and you can echo another musician because you recognise what they are playing. Routines by themselves get boring, jamming alone gets boring - for me the ideal is a balance of the two.

Rationale
So why don't I use band flourishes? A couple of reasons. First of all I don't think it is much fun for everyone in a band if you just turn up, equip your instrument and let someone else do all the bandfls / aliases. Being in a band is about producing something great together which means everyone contributing... hence synchronised manual flourishes. There is nothing like the satisfaction after rehearsal of pulling off a routine together

The second reason is because SOE messed up. If you are playing a mandoviol, bandfill, ommnibox or nalargon then you need to play flourish -1, i.e. A becomes 7, 3, 1, 8 instead of the 8, 4, 2, 1. for the animations and music to tie up with the wind instruments.

Synchronised Manual Flourishes
So... on with how it all works. In groupchat I will call out ' - 's lead'. This means that the named person will then be responsible for the lead-in flourish (first flourish in the pattern). All the band members then have to watch/listen to this person for the animation/music of the lead-in and the moment they see/hear it, they can then play the remaining flourishes of the specified pattern with no pauses in between (cueing up to 5 flos at a time. Note that a /pausem qualifies as a flo for these purposes).
e.g. K'vera calls, "Elewo lead A!". Everyone then looks to Elewo for the animation/music that goes with flourish 8. As soon as they see/hear it, they then press 4 (note that the first flourish in a pattern in always the lead in) , then on seeing the next animation, press 2, etc until the pattern is complete. Note that often I just call the instrument as well, generally chid horn takes the leads depending on the flo set pattern.

Kyorlana, that sounds like exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of. That's just wicked cool.

Looks like I need to visit Eclipse!

If you are around tonight we are on at the Event Horizon, Tirius, Talus for the Blushes of Love event. Starts at 8pm uk (3pm east) and we go on at 9pm uk (4pm eastern). See signature for link to our holosite.