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Several musical ideas
#1
Music 
I've been playing and learning music in this game for a bit more than a year now, and we've sure had our fair share of musical improvements (thanks to people like Grokberg), along the way I've come up with about a handful of ideas for improvements, most of which shouldn't be too much of a hassle to implement. The only reason I haven't personally tried to implement any of these changes is because I'm no coder, nor am I a spriter (although if I were to actually put in the effort required I could probably become better in these two fields).


1) Playable bike horns


I think this would be one of the easier ones of this bunch to implement, seeing as the bike horn already randomly chooses a pitch when activated. I'd imagine that with this change, there would be two ways to play a bike horn, the one we currently have where it just plays a random pitched bike horn noise, and a second way, which could be a TGUI interface (much like most other playable instruments), making it capable of actually playing songs. The way that you could alter the playing mode is by interacting with it with a screwdriver.


2) Better guitar

This is probably easier said than done, but I feel it is necessary, seeing as the guitar we have ingame right now is pretty shitty, and more importantly, rarely played. I think at the very least the notes should be organized in a way in which the instrument could actually be played, a TGUI interface would most likely be required along with this (seeing as it's pretty much a requirement for it to be a decent instrument).


3) Better percussion

Also probably easier said than done (since I know next to nothing about implementing tgui), but the instruments in the percussion kit (available from cargo) are very rarely played, because, as someone who used to play tambourine in a two-man ingame band, they are not very user friendly... Seeing as most of them only have 3 available sounds, I am not really sure on how they could be TGUIified however.


4) Electric guitar

Seeing as this would require additional sprites and sounds, this would be a lot harder to implement than my previously made suggestions. It should, like the others, have a TGUI interface and all the basic things a proper instrument would require. Despite all this, I think it is pretty important, seeing as it's probably one of the coolest dang instruments around, and would make forming an ingame band be actually worthwhile (since it usually just devolves into saxophones blaring against eachother with one dude playing the cowbell). I think the best ways it could be implemented is to either have a seperate electric guitar crate from cargo or have it only spawn on musicians (like our current guitar).


5) Drumkit

Much like the electric guitar, would take some work, but feels necessary for the same reasons. Could be moveable in the same way pianos are (unanchored with a screwdriver). Maybe it could come with the percussion kit crate, or maybe it could be constructable with some rods and all the items in the percussion kit.



None of these ideas I feel are incredibly vital for the average player, but seeing as I got into playing music with thanks to this game, I feel it would be a great way for other people to get into playing music, and besides, the person I've spent the most time with ingame and greatest friend I've met on goon I met because we played music together (big up barfy the mime, greatest goon musician of all time). If these ideas get abandoned, I feel it would be quite a bummer, but not the end of the world.

Feel free to share any further ideas that would improve space musicality, or feedback on any of these ideas. (i'm laying these ideas out here publicly because i know i'm not organized enough to not abandon projects after 2 days, and in the event that someone else wants do make any of these, they are more than free to do so)
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#2
Implementing new instruments isn't very difficult from the code-end (it's all essentially copy/paste work), getting audio samples is the more tricky part. Current strange guitar note choice is my fault, since when I implemented it I knew *literally* nothing about musical scale or anything like that, I wanted to go back and fix it after adding the banjo but the audio source for the guitar (which is the same free source for the banjo, trumpet, sax, cowbell etc unless they've been replaced, linked below) didn't have all the notes needed to fill the scale so it wouldn't be able to be played the same way as others, so I didn't change anything there.

Essentially: these are all good ideas, needs usable audio and some sprites if it's a new instrument. The source for quite a few of the instrument samples in-game is https://philharmonia.co.uk/resources/sound-samples/, which is actually a quite large sample library of instruments, I'm unsure personally which are desirable of these to add or usable from these, but there's some potentially usable content there if someone wants to add in something from it. I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that more instrument variety is good!
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#3
Thanks for your interest in the musical instruments system. I'll just put my thoughts here on a few of the ideas, as someone who's pretty passionate about the subject.

For playable bike horns, while they do have randomly varying pitches, bike horns aren't really built as a pitched instrument to begin with. What'd make a little more sense would be a keyboard synthesiser that used honks as samples; but for it to sound like a half-decent instrument throughout the entire range, we'd need a lot of honk samples at many different pitches. Either that, or we'll have to be okay with pitching the one sample up and down and just living with the crust.

The percussion instruments have been nagging at me since we've started taking efforts to re-do the interfaces, yeah. I've got a few ideas kicking around in the noggin as to how we can make them better, hopefully they'll come to fruition.

More instruments are definitely on the way, as are ongoing efforts to modernise the pitched ones we've already got. SgtManGuy and Mr.Moriarity worked on some sousaphone sprites that I've been procrastinating on turning into an actual instrument due to all the audio editing I'd have to do.

Oh, by the way, the samples from Philharmonia in the UK are very nice but the licensing situation is still, to my eyes, a little bit suspect. I'm personally not entirely sure the samples that we're using from them currently (the tambourine uses their samples I believe) are allowed to be in the game. For more info, hit up Grokberg for the email correspondence we had with 'em.
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#4
how much would it cost to license the sax riff from careless whisper in perpetuity
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#5
(01-25-2023, 12:24 PM)Mouse Wrote: how much would it cost to license the sax riff from careless whisper in perpetuity

you can't copyright a riff. Wham! does own the copyright to their performance and recording of it though, so play it yourself
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#6
okay so how much to license the recording
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#7
Someone managed to play that (that someone being barfy the mime, which should go without saying) back when the tgui interface didnt exist.

Such is the joy of having custom music, you can play any song if you try hard enough
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#8
(01-30-2023, 05:21 AM)Mouse Wrote: okay so how much to license the recording

more than we can afford
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