The Bards Guild

[♪Bardlord Lutemaster]

I have fulfilled many song requests on my thread here, I have uploaded lute covers of over a dozen songs and continue to regularly add more:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/629760/discussions/0/1651043958634622981/

I have also challenged any other bards to face me in musical combat, and my self proclaimed title of Greatest Mordhau Bard continues to go undisputed:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/629760/discussions/0/1651044588038608739/

As obviously the best candidate to do so, I have now taken the mantle upon myself to officially form and helm the Mordhau Bards Guild. Below I will outline the benefits this guild will provide to both its members and the larger Mordhau community as a whole.

Bards Guild Code of Battlefield Conduct

There has been much complaint that bards are useless and annoying and this is unfortunately very often true of young aspiring musicians. This code of ethics aims to set a standard that all bards must adhere to as respected members of the guild, and validates their purpose and legitimacy on the Mordhau battlefield.

• PRACTICE AT HOME
  Don't test your fresh MIDIs with LuteBot in the heat of battle. Nobody wants to hear your mangled notes as you try and figure out a new song in the middle of a fight. Practice offline and get your MIDIs right, then bring only your best performance to the battlefront.
  
• PLAY ON POINT
  Your job as a battlefield musician is to bring attention to where the action should be going on. If you are playing to an audience at the spawn, you are doing it wrong. Survey the battlefield, see where the team needs to be, and stage your performance there.
  
• CARRY A MEDKIT FFS
  You absolutely should throw out a medkit before starting your performance on the point. If you are playing on point as you should be, it will absolutely be a benefit to the team. The lute only takes ONE point to carry, leaving you plenty of opportunities to be useful to the team in other ways with the rest of your loadout too (smoke bomb, fire bomb, bear trap, toolbox).
  
• DEFEND YOURSELF
  Your job is to position yourself near the point and draw attention to the objective, and provide inspiration through the power of music! While that is not always easily quantifiable on the scoreboard, your objective definitely is not to drain your own team's tickets through either allowing yourself to be teamkilled or feeding easy kills to the enemy team while you continue to play on. Position yourself strategically, and when it comes time to fight, cease playing and defend yourself!

Guild Membership Benefits

MIDI Archive Access
LuteBot does not make you instantly good at the lute. The Mordhau lute has a very limited range and most MIDI files not edited carefully and specifically for the purpose of playing on it will sound absolutely terrible. As a member of the guild you will gain access to a growing library of MIDI files edited specifically to sound amazing on the Mordhau lute. Members are encouraged to submit some of their best MIDIs back to the guild to help grow this library.

MIDI Smithing Services
I will also for a limited time provide my services to aspiring bards to edit the MIDI files for their own favorite songs and help guild members optimize them for play on the Mordhau lute.

Access to BardLord LuteMaster's Lute Master Class
Realizing how far superior my Mordhau lute skills really are now, I have shifted my perspective from challenging other bards to offering mentorship instead. I am uploading fewer new lute covers and am now focusing on creating some tutorial content on how to be a better bard, which will be made available to guild members. Some of the things I will cover in this soon to be released series:

• How to edit MIDI files with free software to eliminate extra tracks and isolate the melody for the lute
  
• Tips and tricks to create MIDIs for your favorite songs, and sources for MIDI tracks
  
• Understand what keys sound best on the lute, and how to transpose all or part of a song to fit within the lute's limited range

HOW TO JOIN THE BARDS GUILD

Post video or screenshots here or on our Discord server of you observing the Bards Guild Code of Battlefield Conduct as a well intentioned prospective member. That's it, you're in! You will then be added to the Guild roster and given access to guild resources to improve your bardic skills. The purpose of the Guild is to help bards as a whole improve and become a respected or at least tolerated class in Mordhau, our objective is not be an elitist club.

BARDS GUILD OFFICIAL DISCORD SERVER: https://discord.gg/DFZfWud

I HATE LUTE PLAYERS AND THINK THE LUTE SHOULD BE REMOVED OR MUTED I DIDN'T EVEN READ ANY OF THIS POST AND SKIPPED TO THE BOTTOM BECAUSE WHAT'S IN THIS FOR ME

Hi there most of you people visiting this thread! The Bards Guild offers a Standard by which to hold lute players accountable, so you can feel justified killing or kicking a lute boi not following The Guild's order, and refer them here to learn how to be useful if they insist on playing music on the battlefield.

[♪Bardlord Lutemaster]

The Bards Guild has adopted the ♫ symbol as our clan tag! Our members are not required to carry the tag in front of their names, but choose to do so to represent the good name of the Bards Guild on the battlefield. When you see a lute player carrying the ♫ tag, you can rest assured that you have a quality brand name bard in your midst who will definitely serve as a valuable asset on the battlefront!

[SakenSoul]

For all you bards out there this is a great guild to join!

[WDMeaun]

I haven't read all the pages, but been wondering about one thing.
It's obvious a lot of midi files don't work well with the lute, because they got multiple tracks. It aint rocket science to export single tracks.
Has there been an effort by the Bard Guild to play multiple track songs together? (ie. 1 bard plays the bass track, the other the melody)

Some midi files of songs, like Eiffel 65 - Blue, work extremely well on lute ;)

[WDMeaun]

Originally posted by Greatfox RUS:

Umm... while I know that we only have a single instrument with a rather narrow range, can you tell me how polyphonic it is?

It works quite well, but it can't handle chords that well. In my experience.
Rather than chords an 'aggregated' note would play better. (not sure about the term)

[Солевой берсерк]

Originally posted by WDMeaun:

I haven't read all the pages, but been wondering about one thing.
It's obvious a lot of midi files don't work well with the lute, because they got multiple tracks. It aint rocket science to export single tracks.
Has there been an effort by the Bard Guild to play multiple track songs together? (ie. 1 bard plays the bass track, the other the melody)

Some midi files of songs, like Eiffel 65 - Blue, work extremely well on lute ;)

Haven't played anything together yet but I've seen several ppl on discord wanted to do it.

[SakenSoul]

Originally posted by WDMeaun:

I haven't read all the pages, but been wondering about one thing.
It's obvious a lot of midi files don't work well with the lute, because they got multiple tracks. It aint rocket science to export single tracks.
Has there been an effort by the Bard Guild to play multiple track songs together? (ie. 1 bard plays the bass track, the other the melody)

Some midi files of songs, like Eiffel 65 - Blue, work extremely well on lute ;)

Likewise i havent been apart of this yet but there are those of us in the guild that are excited to do such things. Bardlord has been very busy expanding the library of music available to his bards. There are many people joining and many people submitting and sharing works. So i imagine it will not be long before this tskes off.

Edit: likewise comment was reference to bigdongs comment.

[♪Bardlord Lutemaster]

LuteBot 2.0 laid the groundwork with some new features where live MIDI input devices are now supported, so bards are able to play live music together with multiple parts now! A future planned update for LuteBot will allow synchronous MIDI playback with a group of lute players, but right now it's otherwise pretty tricky to get everyone to play a song in sync together. We do have some MIDIs in our Library already broken into "high" and "low" parts to prepare for the ability to jam out together like this!

[WDMeaun]

Nowadays I'm not that interested in online communities (not salty, I just tend to forget things).
But for the multiple parts bard shows I'm all in!

I have processed some midi files myself. (fur elise and such are quite standard I'm quessing).
I wouldn't mind editing a few for multi part songs, or just as a single track.

Got a few theme songs converted; some Aqua songs (they work really well); Never gonna give you up and such.
Some great songs only work well with multiple instruments and some just require a lot of manual editing, which I don't really have the time for. (unless it's Never gonna give you up, which I already have).
It's a bit hard to find well-known dance tracks, because they can convert really well.

[Dimitris]

:C me no know how to lutebot

[Abacus]

If you play Original work using MIDI keyboard then cool....The feature is there.

Nobody is doing that though, they are just playing back MIDI files and "editing files" of songs you didn't create isn't impressive...keep that in Ableton people.

[WDMeaun]

I know how to use Ableton (used it in performances). But:
1. My keyboard (and loads of other stuff) got stolen a year ago and only received a fraction as compenstion. Twas touch sensitive and those beautiful feautures. It's not high on my list of things to replace.
2. It's unnecessary. People in public games will not notice the added creativity and for actual performances it would be lame to use midi files. (that's why I no longer listen to Pharell/N.E.R.D; mp3 playing artist.. Stay home if you aint gonna perform!)
3. A good friend has all the ableton + video/audio stuff; I'm just a programmer with a flair for music. Our combination works pretty well for some kind of exhibitions.

I would love performing live with others, if it would be for some actual event. In public games you would unbalance the game and it would probably just not work 9/10 times.
When voice chat gets introduced, I'll use it to sing-a-long as live performance, thank you.

Knowledge of Aqua's lyrics isn't a problem in any case.
But granted, I would most certaintly use my midi keyboard in game. I still miss it; a good midi keyboard is extremely useful.

edit-
Play well-known songs, not original work. It works a lot better, when your audience recognizes the music.
Unless you're a creative good musician, but then still ;) (I'm not; there's a reason, why I'm a developer)

[♪Bardlord Lutemaster]

The Bards Guild is for musicians of all types! We have just recently started an initiative within the guild to support some actual live jam sessions in game using the new LuteBot 2.0 MIDI input features! We are also working on multi-part MIDI files to play together with a band of other lute players.

[♪Bardlord Lutemaster]

Originally posted by Mysto:

If you play Original work using MIDI keyboard then cool....The feature is there.

Nobody is doing that though, they are just playing back MIDI files and "editing files" of songs you didn't create isn't impressive...keep that in Ableton people.

We actually have one member ♪Odysseus who uses a real guitar as a MIDI controller to play the lute, and he is leading the charge for live performances in game!

Most of our members do still edit and play back MIDI files though, because there is that barrier of additional costs and configuration required to use a MIDI controller, and less people will be capable or interested in it because of this.

[♪Bardlord Lutemaster]

Originally posted by WDMeaun:

I know how to use Ableton (used it in performances). But:
1. My keyboard (and loads of other stuff) got stolen a year ago and only received a fraction as compenstion. Twas touch sensitive and those beautiful feautures. It's not high on my list of things to replace.
2. It's unnecessary. People in public games will not notice the added creativity and for actual performances it would be lame to use midi files. (that's why I no longer listen to Pharell/N.E.R.D; mp3 playing artist.. Stay home if you aint gonna perform!)
3. A good friend has all the ableton + video/audio stuff; I'm just a programmer with a flair for music. Our combination works pretty well for some kind of exhibitions.

I would love performing live with others, if it would be for some actual event. In public games you would unbalance the game and it would probably just not work 9/10 times.
When voice chat gets introduced, I'll use it to sing-a-long as live performance, thank you.

Knowledge of Aqua's lyrics isn't a problem in any case.
But granted, I would most certaintly use my midi keyboard in game. I still miss it; a good midi keyboard is extremely useful.

edit-
Play well-known songs, not original work. It works a lot better, when your audience recognizes the music.
Unless you're a creative good musician, but then still ;) (I'm not; there's a reason, why I'm a developer)

Agree with everything you say for the most part - except for your edit!
Some of my BEST tunes are songs that I know well but may not be otherwise widely popular, yet translated to the lute very well. This gives the impression to most other players that you are playing an amazing original lute song, because they can't place what song it is but it just sounds so good. My lute cover of Satyricon - King is my favorite for this effect. ;-) In my opinion it's more about finding the right song that will sound good on the lute than whether or not people will recognize what song it is.

[WDMeaun]

I have to say that certain kind of music works -extremely- well with the lute in game. As said, I'm a programmer, so I'm slighty inclined to use the technical solution. ;)
For example I think Blue - Eiffel 65 and Candyman - Aqua work really, really well. You can't recognize the original song that easily, but it just plays good in the lute with the fast pacing and use of chords.

To make a lot of songs work in game you'd need that improvisation of a musician ;)
Am kinda curious to hear the end results. I can listen to most, if not all, music, but only know Satyricon by name.