Musician Archive

Hi all - i made tech 3 this week and have been playing around with crafting instruments and experimentation.

I currently have 5 experimentation points - built several traz's and dumped points into new category called quality - huge difference in sound depending on materials i used. Tested this with several other entertainers listening and this is what we found:

Low quality materials and low quality experimentation - very monotone sounding

High quality materials with med quality experimentation - sharper low notes

High quality materials with high quality experimentation - fantastic sound - sharper low notes as above and very very nice high notes.

Personally I can't wait until I master now - since it provides the most number of experimentation options and points - going to be remaking myself a ton of instruments.

FYI the materials make a difference in the initial crafting - as much as 25% of the quality (that's using stuff with overall quality > 900) while the experimentation points can add to that. I've gotten as high as 56% quality out of it so far. But with all crafting there is a chance of failure at both the initial stage and each experimentation run.

My next project is to set up experiments with each instrument - to figure out the range's - not worthwhile right now for me on bandfill or chid as my failure rate is still pretty high - though i do run experiments on them - just can't predict results as easily.

BTW to experiment you need to be standing next to a public weapon droid and general item crafting station to get the option. I discovered the other night that the coronet cantina has one somewhere nearby cause i could experiment inside the cantina on rest breaks

AHA! I knew it. I make a modest living selling instrumensts, so I always had a bunch on hand and rarely played the same one twice, and I could've sworn that sometimes my music sounded a little better or worse, but I was always like "naaaawwww, everyone knows instrument quality is worthless." Thanks for the info, good work.

Smilin'Jack Ivrees

Imperial Muscian - Corbantis Galaxy

I'm having a hard time quantifying "sharper low notes"

could we get a nice wave form look at the sounds compared? or a comment supporting this from the devs?

Kora i'll work on figuring out how to get you some quantifiation but will be a while - this wasn't a scientific test by any means but 4 ppl agreed that the sound was different and the the low notes were sharper (maybe clearer is a better term?) I'm not a musician in real life but did play the flute as a kid so not sure what terms are best.

I also expect that quality of sound card etc makes a diff - which is why i had them listen to me play all three rather than have them try it themselves - at least that way we were talking same environment.

Spice - my best suggestion is to go ahead and get at least domestic arts 1 and maybe 2 (get better xp each item) - I am almost at master artisan solely by making food - i give away the low end stuff - sell the higher end stuff and already have a house with a vendor in it.

Also befriend some creature handlers - best use of low end food there is - they can use tons of it and it's much more convenient for them than foraging for it - and yes i get uxp when their pets eat it

I think we should get crafting experience for making instruments ! I want to open a music instrument shop but it really sucks having to make 1,000 units of blob candy just to get enough crafting skill to be able to place a vendor in my house ( people have problems taking candy from strangers!) besides I don't want to be stuck with a big, old, ugly, bulky vendor but it's a huge time sink crafting stuff you don't need just to be able to acquire a secksi Twi'lek vendor

Everyone's ear for music is different. Its also quite probably that everyone's soundcard is different, too, so while I find this topic amusing, I don't buy into it.

Instruments last forever at the moment, so durability experimentation is out the window.

'Effectiveness' is a vague concept as well, because the only thing I know that improves wound healing are skill packs for clothing with sockets, and bio engineered cloth for clothing.

The only way to conclusively prove that instruments 'sound better' with quality made materials is to make half a dozen instruments of differing qualities, use the same machines and run through different songs and watching them through a spectrum analyzer. Since I doubt many of us have a spectrum analyzer sitting around in our homes, I do not think the developers in their mad rush to code this game took the bleeding time to develop a distortion, high-pass, and low-pass filter to apply to all instruments of varying degrees of 'experimentation quality'.

I'm also willing to eat my words if a developer actually did this, too.

If they had this depth of instruments, I'm sure we'd have swoop bikes by now. Then again, that bandfill you made might be a motor for one.

Cheers!

Weibacca
Master Musician and Entertainer
Kaadara, Naboo, Bria

Yes, unless we get a statement from the dev's that experimentation has an effect on instruments, I'll take this with a grain of salt. Maybe our correspondent can get some info on this?

Maybe i wasn't very clear in my statement I now have options to improve both durability andQUALITY on the experimentation window. Just got those options with Tech3 - so if you haven't done any experimentation lately and you are Tech3 or above try it and see what your options are. Personally I'd love to know if other options show up at Tech4 and Master.

Due to the way the music system appears to be setup, this would be almost impossible without using up a ton of memory. Also, if they had paid such close attention to instrument sounds as this, then there would almost certainly be different sounds among the horns.

Iwanted this to be true, I really did, but I don't think that it is. After reading your post, I spent most of last night scouring Rori for the best and worst resources I could. I checked the bazaar, but figured that giving someone 1000 credits for 100 units of 98 OQ metal would be encouraging undesirable behavior.

After finding some 110 OQ steel and 19 OQ aluminum, and having on hand some 850+ steel and 999 OQ aluminum, I went to the local general item crafting station to make the best and worst Chid horns I could. After a couple of tries, I got a "moderate" success Chid at 2% quality. Then I used the good resources, and9 experimentation points to make a 68% quality Chid.

I've been grinding away the last few 10k towards tech4playing Jazz on a Chid for the past few days, so those flourish sounds are pretty ingrained into my head. But when I tried the new instruments, I couldn't tell any difference between the crap Chid and the mid-quality one. What quality level were you hitting? Andwas the sound difference more pronounced on different songs?

Oh, and I really don't remember *not* having the quality category before. I haven't been paying too much attention, so I suppose it is possible it recently showed up and my memory retrofitted it in to when I was doing up Slither's and Fizzes. I might try a slither with the best/worst metals, and see if there's a stronger difference...

I'm afraid I'm with the group that views this as wishful thinking. To illustrate, I have a compatriot in my local cantina who has just reached Music Knowledge 1. He swears he can tell the difference between Slither, Fanfar, and Traz. It all sounds the same to me.

I'll happily make high-quality instruments if someone can quantitatively prove there's a difference, but so far I haven't seen (nor heard) the evidence.

I played ballad with a traz - first one was under 10% quality, second around 25%, third around 50%