Musician Archive

I've read many posts here where people suggest that an excellent addition to the musician's high end content would be the addition of a composition skill where the band leader could arrange a series of flourihes in advance and then these flourishes would appear on the screens of his band members so that they could manualy play songs without having to resort to macro's.

Well it occured to me as I was about to crash for the night that this ability already exists and it's name is System Message (in the Novice Squad Leader class), with a little creativity, I'm confidenta determined band leader could use it to effectively mimic the composition skill that is so desired by the musician community at large.

I for one am planning on making this my goal after I hit master musician, not only in order to possibly make use of this, but also to make my band tougher when we're playing overt.

Anyways some food for thought, apologies all around if this has already been suggested,

Smilin'Jack Ivrees

Imperial Musician - Corbantis

As I understand it, the System Message ability only sends messages to players. It doesn't actually send commands to them. Specifically in the case of trying to coordinate flourishes, the functionality already exists to "compose" music that the whole group plays. When I'm interested in trying it with the group, I generally do this:

1. Come up with a good Flourish sequence. This is creative, but it's as creative as we can currently go. No individual notes, but you can "paint" moods through long sequences of flourish


2. I'll ask the band to set up, if they haven't, their flourishes in slots 1 through 8 for access via Fkeys 1 through 8.


3. I'll send them the sequence of flourishes. Maybes it's 3 5 3 1 8 5 6 5


4. When everyone's got it (some program it sometimes), I'll initiate a 3-2-1 countdown, explaining that when everyone sees "1", they should hit F3


5. Then they should hit F5, F3 and so on in quick succession. The game queues up flourishes. I don't know how many it can remember.

Then we sit back and watch!

Sometimes people will actually do the flourishes in order in something approximately realtime That's certainly cool too. It's about the fun of trying with the benefit to the crowd and our XP pools upon success.

I think the idea behind the composition skill is to create a series of macros in advance strung together into a piece. Not to have them appear for others to play. Essentially a set of flourishes for each instrument pre-programmes (so the timing is down)rather than have each performer play them individually.

While this is possible in the current macro system, it is a LOT of commands as you have to program them separately for each instrument in the macro. The composition skill would set a "frame" (where the frame is the length of one flourish), and you would put the flourished for each instrument into it. Then the next frame would be a second set for each instrument... and so on. Rather than programming each into a macro.

The other idea is the conductor ability, which sounds somewhat like the system message where a person would be the conductor of the band and direct the flourishes either by acutally controlling the instrument of others in the band, or instructing them which flo's to play