My suggestion is to have players start with either an instrument that is race specific or are given a random instrument. This could be part of the tutorial quest where you get your stuff from storage.
It might be useful to have something be a starting instrument, though. A lot of people that I've been playing with had no idea about the whole music system being a thing. I think it might be a nice addition. There could even be a quest for it, perhaps even some explaination as to why you can play an instrument in the first place.
I kind of agree but there are so many instruments in the game it couldn't hurt that much to have at least one very early on.
Let's not start with an instrument, but let us craft a very simple one early on. For instance primitive drums. Leather + Wood. And maybe a pan flute. I think all the fancy pants instruments should still be found, but why not let players have fun with instruments early on? It'd be nice.
Hehehe. Rudimentary instuments. I can see it now! Apex running around playing the coconut drums, Florans playing blade-of-grass flutes (Or their basic bone xylophones. Poor Florans.), Humans making some sort of sinew-guitar or hair-violin, Hylotl playing a hollowed twig-flute, Glitch playing some kind of crude music box, and Avians using a headress of birdsong or something. This, I can see. Unfortunately I can also hear it. Canon in D in horrible basic almost-instruments, and the occasionally gifted n00b playing through the fire and the flames on a MacGuyver'd flesh-triangle. This, I cannot abide. Let's try to maintain some quality instruments, eh? Good grief, what a scary future.
Oooh yes! That is a wonderful idea! Racial craftable instruments! Available early on and would add so much awesome fluff to the game... Each of them should come with it's own, simple, race specific song to play. A nice bongo solo for Apex, a Floran flute sonata,... For Humans I'd maybe go with a horn, maybe a didgeridooooooo! Hylotl... maybe a simple bamboo flute, or a shamisen... Avians doing birdsongs, oooh that's adorable! Maybe they could have some sort of scoll that acts like a microphone with beautiful bird noises. We don't have to stick with canon in D. I think it's a delightful idea... and while the proper instruments are a nice silly addition to start your own space rockband with, the idea of racial, simple instruments is a very nice one too.
Maybe. There is, however, one think that I think would be truly, truly, awesome. Give each race a starting song that is but a piece of the whole. Let it sound nice by itself, but let it become something greater when combined with those songs of the other races. That might be a bit romantic, though. Such things are far-fetched in the hierarchy of priority.
Starbound is a game about exploration. If you get all the cool items at the start, it makes exploring less worthwhile! The only thing I could get behind is giving each race a cultural instrument RECIPE that they can craft at some point, but even then I'm not really such a huge fan. Okay, this is awesome. Get a hylotl, floran, human, glitch, novakid, and apex together to form a band in multiplayer. Of course the issue is that songs are in the song folder so getting them is a bit.. weird.
Canon in D is here by default. What I am proposing is that this be a default as well. Something composed by the music-makers of Starbound, perhaps?
I think the cultural recipe would be the best choice! It adds a little personality to each faction and adds some fun for new players to play around with. I am always sad when I start a new character and never find an instrument... Even if the racial ones don't sound perfect and are really simple... it'd be nice. I think it could be pretty easy, I am still learning how to work with ABC files, but a single file could hold all the info for all the songs, if you just had one song called "Racial Melody" that utilizes all the racial instruments, played alone just plays that part of the entire track, but together as a band forms the entire song... I think that's how other ABC files already work... So yes it could work and it would be AWESOME. Yes yes yes yes. This is the best idea.
What I meant was that I don't know how you could be a glitch and not have the apex song! I'm sure there might be SOME way around this, but it'd be more work and possibly would require changing the cool way things work right now...
Oh, Huh. You're certainly right. Mmh. Yeah, I don't know. Wait, wait, wait, Sherbniz mentioned something about having multiple parts in one song file? Perhaps we can have the specific parts of the song play only on specific instruments. Is that possible?
I'm not entirely sure, but when you group up to play Canon in D for instance, you will notice that not every instrument is playing the exact same notes, even if synchronized via Band function. I converted a midi song to ABC earlier via tutorial, and I might have messed up since every instrument plays the same track, leading to them just overlapping instead of playing together like that... I might fiddle with it later. Maybe I could test to see if two of the same instruments would overlap directly. Gonna test it as soon as someone on our server comes online. Edit: It seems multi-instrument songs are often provided in multiple parts from what I see. Looking at the ABC files in notepad, there is no real visible signs that the song is divided by instrument... hm... Either way, I'm sure this could be implemented some way if the desire for it was there. I'll do more experimentation tomorrow.
This would require that there be a means of getting instruments to abide by the rules of the .ABC file and the method by which it denotes which instruments play which notes, but ignore others. I certainly hope it works, but Starbound's known for requiring some simplifying of notation.
