Initial Band Meetup Planning - October 20, 9pm EST

[Siltharan]

Thanks to Briallan for setting up the first band meeting date on the 20th, 9pm EST. I'm guessing we can just use the multi-part songs posted in the other thread if we want to test out our choice of instruments and/or the song arrangements, to see what might work for our group. I'll be working on my own little arrangement project of FF3/6's Aria di Mezzo Carattere (Celes's Theme). I'll also set up a new thread pointing out Maestro and some arrangement/conversion tutorials for those also interested in creating ABCs of songs not easily found around the main ABC sites.

I just uploaded my first attempt at creating an ABC for the aforementioned MIDI to my own shared dropbox folder: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k3cw803etycbyny/NhVSTEfQK6

First glaring issue is instrument choice. I can't get harmony between the clarinet parts and horn part using the standard 0/12/-12/etc. setup. Tired, and I'm heading off for the night, so no further adjustments until the morning. I think I'm figuring things out, though... Maybe need to tweak what instruments get which parts, considering the variations in volume and... well, SOUND between instruments.

Edit: Uploaded a new version of the MIDI to the above link. Messed with the volumes to make it sound more like the MIDI itself, and that also seemed to solve some harmony issues for some reason. Perhaps everyone planning on attending should download it. Needs are: 2xLute, Harp, Theorbo, 2xClarinet, Horn. May combine parts if necessary.

[Briallan]

Silth, what exactly is the harmony problem you are encountering? I downloaded your ABC file for the opera and looked at it in Maestro. I thought maybe the problem might have been due to notes being out of range of the instrument, but there are only a few out-of-range notes and they only relate to the Theorbo.

By the way, when you say you "Messed with the volumes," I was just curious if you were editing the MIDI or ABC file directly to change track volume, or if you were using some tool, like Digero's online ABC volume editor. I don't think Maestro has a built-in volume editor. So far, I have been addressing volume issues by doubling up on instruments (e.g., adding two flutes playing the same part if I didn't think it was loud enough), but I will probably need to make finer tuning adjustments at some point when I get further along. So, I was wondering what you were doing that you might or might not have found effective :)

 

[Briallan]

Since I scheduled our initial band meeting, I suppose I owe everyone an agenda as to what will happen at the meeting.

My plans are to use the time to do such things as:

1. meet more people in our extended family who are interested in playing music together in LOTRO
2. discuss future plans for playing together
3. give people the opportunity to do some live-testing of ABC files (they can be tested with Digero's ABC player, but I'm not sure if this exactly replicates the experience of playing them in-game)
4. get people together with experienced minstrels who might be able to provide training in instruments you want to play
5. play some songs together and have some fun

I'm sure other topics of interest will come up once we get together. Meeting will last until .. whenever we're done, I guess.

So far I'm aware of 6-7 people who are interested in playing in a group, but there might be more of you out there. Please come if you have any interest!

 

[Siltharan]

When I played the file through Maestro after creating the parts, for some reason the clarinet and horn parts didn't really seem to mesh well. I cracked open the ABC itself in Notepad and just changed the volumes a bit, slightly lower or higher based on what seemed to be more egregiously out of tune or the preferred intonation, respectively. I was also in the "messing around" kind of mood so I didn't really detail what I did. Hope that was a good enough explanation. ;)

[Briallan]

Yes, thanks! That's what I thought you might have been doing.

[Siltharan]

Also, Bri, do you think we should choose a few songs to have at the ready, so people don't have to keep popping off and on to reload their libraries/songlists? Each time you download a new song and add it to the Songs folder, you have to run the Songbook library filler to update the plugin itself. If we plan on playtesting, perhaps we should select five or six songs for everyone to grab.

[Briallan]

Yes, that's a good idea, I think 5 or 6 is probably the most we would do anyway. Probably we will just take turns testing songs until we want to move on to something else. I would ask everyone to download the following songs from my Dropbox Location, since they have issues I want to test (although we may not get to all to them if other people have songs to test besides you, me and Krokhur):

Just What I Needed

Crazy Train

Wild Nights

 

[Siltharan]

Sounds good. I downloaded those 3 songs. From my Dropbox Link I'd like to test out these two:

ff3celesopera.abc - My little pet project... May change instruments around/swap parts/etc.

EBDrugStore.abc - Testing this as some of the EarthBound soundtracks use echo tracks (basically an identical line very slightly shifted later behind the main track) and I want to see how that works out in-game. Kind of iffy in the player.