Hi, Currently you can play ABC files with the ingame instruments, but you can't play instruments "live" (i.e. using the keyboard). It looks like playing with keystrokes was a planned feature of Starbound but it seems like it hasn't been implemented yet: Once you’ve got one of these instruments you’ll be able to hit various keyboard keys to play different notes -Tiy, 1st July 2013 (http://playstarbound.com/30th-june-progress) I'd love to see this implemented ingame. I used to play LOTRO which had a similar feature and I think the way they did it could work in Starbound as well. In LOTRO, you entered music mode by equipping an instrument then typing /music into the chat. In music mode, each playable note mapped to a keyboard character (which was editable in settings). Entering the keyboard character would sound the respective note. Once you were done, you could type /music again to exit the music mode and resume normal actions.
