Musician Archive
Thread: Looking for Macros...
I actually like it when my musician character is the only one playing as I can then hear my own flourishes clearly. I like to experiment with groups of flourishes that I feel sound good together. Play around with it some--you don't need to be particularly musical, as anyone is capable of deciding what they think sounds good. Use the /note command (thanks Tiaga!) to jot down which combinations you like. I have several for SW3 that are 3 to 6 flourishes long.
Once you have a few little 'groups' made, you can either macro them or set them up as aliases, or even just do them manually. Since you have some set groups of flourishes you can now kind of simulate basic musical forms: Binary (AB, add in a repeat so it's actually AABB), ternary (ABA), rondo (ABACA). Pick one group to use as your 'A', a different one for B, C etc. Every time the form says A, play whichever group you've chosen.
Since the songs never change keys, you won't get any real masterpieces, but you can make things interesting for yourself and your audience. Some other tips to keep in mind: /pausemusic will make 10 seconds of silence; don't be afraid to try repeating a flourish twice in a row, some of them sound good (the imperial march one for example); listen to each flourish and recognise which ones sound higher in pitch than others--linking flourishes that are all in the same register will usually sound good, but if you want to be more dramatic, go from a low register to a high, or vice versa.
Wait! Before you one-star and flame, let me explain 
I'm not trying to grind, but a couple of us were jamming in Dearic Cantina on the new Infinity server, where I seem to have become the town BF healer, and trying various combinations of instruments and songs. Slitherhorn/Fizz and Starwars1/2/Rock only...the server is only a week or so old 
Anyway, I got thinking about proper bands; multi-instrument work and so on, and actual 'scored' pieces. Now in RL, I'm pretty tone deaf and not very musical, and the interaction required to make music in SWG is hardly 'Music' as such, but I was wondering if anyone here has had any success at scripting decent flourish-combinations and pauses? In particular, has anyone had a go at writing sets of macros for various instruments? If so, I'd love to try some out...it'd be great to try an actual 'piece of music' rather than the usual endless-flo-loops
why dont you put your own marco's together , that way you will be happy with the outcome
its quite easy to do a marco..
/pause 5; <- would make the marco do nothing for 5 seconds.
/flourish 8; <- would do flourish 8 or the command for the flourish u type in..
/ui action toolbarSlot01; <- you normally put this at the end off the marco so that when the marco has finished the commands u have told it to do , it then clicks on the toolbar button above f1 on your toolbar.. why? because the Slot01 is telling it to select slot 1 on the toolbarslot which is above f1..
here's an example...
/flourish 8;
/pause 2;
/flourish 7;
/pause 2;
/flourish 6;
/pause 2;
/flourish 5;
/pause 2;
/flourish 4;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlot01;
after u have made a name and an icon for ur new marco u would drag it above F1 on the toolbar , because we want it to repeat itself over again, sometimes u may need to drag the marco icon , into , both box 1 and 2 on the toolbar for it to work..
DudeIama Noobe I actually like it when my musician character is the only one playing as I can then hear my own flourishes clearly. I like to experiment with groups of flourishes that I feel sound good together. Play around with it some--you don't need to be particularly musical, as anyone is capable of deciding what they think sounds good. Use the /note command (thanks Tiaga!) to jot down which combinations you like. I have several for SW3 that are 3 to 6 flourishes long.
Once you have a few little 'groups' made, you can either macro them or set them up as aliases, or even just do them manually. Since you have some set groups of flourishes you can now kind of simulate basic musical forms: Binary (AB, add in a repeat so it's actually AABB), ternary (ABA), rondo (ABACA). Pick one group to use as your 'A', a different one for B, C etc. Every time the form says A, play whichever group you've chosen.
Since the songs never change keys, you won't get any real masterpieces, but you can make things interesting for yourself and your audience. Some other tips to keep in mind: /pausemusic will make 10 seconds of silence; don't be afraid to try repeating a flourish twice in a row, some of them sound good (the imperial march one for example); listen to each flourish and recognise which ones sound higher in pitch than others--linking flourishes that are all in the same register will usually sound good, but if you want to be more dramatic, go from a low register to a high, or vice versa.
Velvet-dancer wrote:
Since the songs never change keys, you won't get any real masterpieces, but you can make things interesting for yourself and your audience. Some other tips to keep in mind: /pausemusic will make 10 seconds of silence; don't be afraid to try repeating a flourish twice in a row, some of them sound good (the imperial march one for example); listen to each flourish and recognise which ones sound higher in pitch than others--linking flourishes that are all in the same register will usually sound good, but if you want to be more dramatic, go from a low register to a high, or vice versa.
Maybe I should actually start writing down what I think sounds good. I have it in mind, and if I'm not being lazy or experimenting, I'll only do flourishes I think sound good together. Though.. I have trouple playing flourish 4 of starwars3 only once.. I just can't do it.. If I hit it, I hit it again. I should just put a macro in my F4 slot that does "/flo 4;/flo 4" and get it over with.
One thing I've been wanting to tackle, but is really difficult because it requires groups of others that are actually interested. Everyone needs to be involved in the process, or most people will be bored and uninterested. That is songs that aren't just bandflourishes. I started doing something like this for Jazz, and it sounded pretty good, but using the sound editing program was big and combersome. Maybe I need to dig up an old mod file authoring tool to try and arrange things.
With a coordinated band you could really do some fun things with the rondo form. Have A be a full ensemble, B and C could be different groups of instruments, maybe doing bandflos in pairs with the rest of the group running the ground bass, that sort of thing.
I also have fun trying to echo another player, but it's difficult for me to remember all the different flourishes. And I have to make a note of the patterns I like because I don't play musician nearly enough to commit it to memory
Ohhh! That reminds me of something I did awhile back.. I THINK it was on starwars3.. I was on the Traz. I offset myself by 1 flourish (I forget if it was forward - IE putting an extra flourish/pause in, or backward, IE doing a bandflourish with band flourishes off) then started doing bandflourishes. It sounded really interesting.
I don't know much about composing, but reading over your suggestions, I actually do a lot of those already. I just didn't know the name for them - or even that they had names.
I thought slot 1 was 00, so /ui action toolbarslot00 would use 1? thats how it was when i was using a camping macro long ago, dunno if they changed it.
Its still that way Sariin.. 00 is F1. and 01 is F2
Weird, isnt it?
From a technical standpoint, 0 is easier. If you have a list of items, you may think of the first one as 1. I even called it first, which implies 1. When you look at a list of items, you start counting at 1. Really, the number you start at is irrelevent as long as you know what to start counting at, but 1 is used by convention, and conveniently tells you both how many are in the list (When you get to the end) and what is a certain way into the list. However, a computer having to count out through every item in a list could get a bit slow and in many cases is a waste of time. A computer has the convenience that it already has things counted out. This is done by memory addresses. So to find out how far something is into the list, it merely has to take the location of the list, and add in an offset for the number it's looking for. The first item in the list is at offset 0, the second at offset 1, and so on. So if it were to start at 1, it would have to first subtract 1 to get the offset. It may seem like a trivial extra step, but it can start to add up. In any case, many languages do shield this from the programmers. C and C++ as you noted do not, and are fairly low level languages. The languages that do start counting at 1 (Or even that can start at any number) just add in the extra step for you.
However, while that explains why start at 0.. The toolbarSlot00 is text. You can find it in the executable if you dump out all printable characters in a line. That means the computer isn't even looking at 00 as 00, it is looking at it as a character. So likely this is just a case of a programmer being in the start at 0 mindset as they were filling in the text.
(* A note for those that are programmers, I purposely kept programming terminology out of this and used simple terms that conveyed the idea to the average person better. However, what I referred to as a list would more properly called an array, and when I'm talking about text, of course that would be a string.)