Musician Archive
Thread: How to join a band as a young musician
It won't let you play a different song than the others in the group, no matter how far away you are.
The only way your suggestion would work is if they stood far away, played their song, and were THEN invited to the group. As long as they didn't stop, they would be fine. Every time they stopped, they would need to leave the group, restart the song, and be reinvited again by the group leader.
Posted something along these lines previously, but have now figured out a good solution to it!
Ok, so our more skilled musicians have started getting a tad frustrated when musicians who can only play SW1 or 2 have been joining our band in the evenings, as it slows down their xp very much. (This must be true because I am a dancer and was about 5k behind a musician in hitting novice status last night, but since he had to play a couple songs below his skill level, even with a fizz, I still ended up beating him to the novice level.) At one point I went outside to dance in the streets because, if you haven't seen, formal dancing takes up MUCHO space and I needed a change of scenery to boot. What I noticed as I walked around was that as long as my group members' health/action/mind bars were visible in the group window (and still displayed in red/green/blue format) was that I got the bonus xp of being in the group, even though I was out of listening range!
What does this mean to young musicians? If my theory is correct, which I assume it is since grouping seems to work the same for dancers and musicians, you can join a higher level band, walk outside of listening range, and begin playing! You may even be able to sneak towards the very far end of the bar and be in a spot that you can not be heard and still get healing points, but I haven't tried that.
What this means to me as a dancer that is going to be building music points though, is that since I already have ent healing IV, I can definitely go outside and learn music (if I don't want to build instruments all night! hehe) to get xp. 
Just thought I'd share...