Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The person who passed away was also a minstrel, and I was able to get a copy of his song collection and I retrofitted it to fit my band, which was useful, so I'll be playing his music, which I hope pleases his friends to hear his music one last time. I didn't know the deceased, but he had pretty good taste in music and was a good arranger.

This will be the second memorial that I've performed. Interestingly, the first one I did I gained a best friend, and she's organizing the memorial for the second group! She recommended me to them, and I'm happy to help. Fortunately my band is large enough to play this guy's songs without alteration, aside from rearranging the instrument order to fit where the instruments are in my band.

I also solicited requests for other music to play, and one song was Paralyzer. There was a lot of music where all I had was a song title, and I had to search and make inferences as to who the band was. And I usually got it right.

And I found this video. Which is pure awesomesauce! The music is good, too.

So now I can easily embed! This was from Sunday afternoon.



Five of seven songs were Trans-Siberian Express, and four of those I converted the night before. :-) I had absolutely no idea what I was going to play up until about 18 hours before my performance! I didn't want to play just holiday music.

The show is only 30 minutes long, and I thought it went REALLY well. I felt a lot more comfortable doing this show, having seen my previous one at Winterfest. This one was performed on a server that's predominately French. Very nice people, they make amazing music there! There are several European servers, one is French, one is mainly English, and I think two or three are German.

I was invited to perform by two friends, one German, one American, who had an in-game wedding! No, they're not married in real life, I'm guessing they're just good friend in the game. But the weekend before last I attended an in-game wedding of two people where the groom traveled 2,000 miles to marry his fiance, only to be stymied by the plague. So they held an in-game wedding!

It was.... interesting. Not as much fun as the French/German one, which was massive and lasted some 10 hours including the reception. But it was still fun. That makes two weddings I've attended (played at one), and one in-game memorial service that I played at. That was an experience! I was glad to have helped out for them, they really appreciated it.

In Lord of the Rings Online you can form guilds, or as they're known in-game, Kinships. A collection of friends who like to get together to go forth and squish beasties. And after kinships have been around for a certain period of time, they can purchase kinship houses, virtual real estate.

This one guy in-game regularly hosts parties at his kinship house where a half-dozen bands or so show up and play music. People who don't play music, or do and aren't playing music at that time or don't feel like playing music that night, stand around and enjoy it or dance or whatever.

I played for NINE HOURS LAST NIGHT! From 6:30pm (local) to almost 3:30AM!

It was so much fun!

We played Led Zeppelin for over an hour, later Pink Floyd for over half an hour, I played a few Tull pieces, broke into some Lady Gaga and also played It's Raining Men, a Devo piece, etc. I was the second band to start and the second to last to leave.

And I am TIRED this morning!

While I was working on converting music last week, doing a bunch of Tull, I did this one piece and found out it was 43 minutes long! It was an entire album! No, not Thick As A Brick, it was the following album: A Passion Play. I'm going to play it in-game Monday or Wednesday night. I think this week I'm going to work on expanding my collection of Floyd and Zepp, I only have four of each.

This is a fantastic social event for these times! I just hope some characters don't suddenly go permanently silent over the coming weeks.

I have a band in the game, I can muster eight players. I have my main paid account, plus seven free-to-play accounts, which exist only to provide me with additional musicians. I can run all eight copies of the game on my 32 gig Asus gaming laptop. If I want, I can also run one of my wife's accounts for nine. And I'm planning on bringing that number up to 11 as I have some more complex songs that I want to play.

The way music works in-game is you find a MIDI version of a song you like, let's say Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick. You run a program called Maestro, or other similar programs, that converts it to a music format called ABC. ABC is a text file that breaks the tracks in the MIDI into a text representation, it's been around for ages - predating computers - and is a file format that can be read by the game and played by characters in-game! We have frequent band jams/dance parties, both spontaneous and planned. Tuesday night was planned.

If a MIDI cooperates, I can convert a song from MIDI to ABC in 5-10 minutes and preview it in a program called ABC Player, which takes as long as the song actually is. I also need to play it in-game, because the ABC Player isn't always 100% faithful to how it sounds in-game. That takes time, because you have to start up all the instances, load the players, start a party, invite everyone, load the correct instruments, tell them to load the song, then FINALLY you can start play! It takes some effort.

All that setup takes time, usually you do the MIDI/ABC conversion and preview of a whole bunch of songs, then fire up LOTRO, set up your band, and preview a whole bunch of songs in a private place. Make notes on changes that you need to do, and you're good. So that way you're only spending setup time once.

Last night we were playing in Bree, a famous town of the first book of Lord of the Rings and a major city in the game. We're down at South Gate, where we frequently play. One of the bands whom I regularly play with, led by Fersinda, we got in to playing as much Jethro Tull as we could, going back and forth. It was well after midnight, finally a friend announced we could play one more song each, then she had to leave. That was fine, I also needed to get to bed. I suggested to Fersinda that we each play Bouree, a wonderful instrumental based on a work by Bach. Fersinda's version is awesome! Mine I'd never played before in-game, I'd just made it last month.

So she player hers. I played mine. Mine was better than I expected, had some good points and was well-received. I used a harp in place of a piano and a special deluxe bassoon instead of a flute, and it sounded pretty good. And we realized we used the same MIDI to make our songs! Completely different ABCs, but same MIDIs.

And I think it was Fersinda suggested we should play them synchronized.

AND WE DID.

We had both split our songs in to four parts (four musicians), with different instrumentation. We grouped our bands together into something called a raid party, it allowed us to have all eight of us in one group and to start our songs simultaneously. We faced off several yards apart, which was my suggestion, to create a more pronounced stereo effect. She loaded up our musicians from her version on her computer, I did the same with my version from my computer, and did I a /playstart, which triggers our musicians to start playing simultaneously.

It was amazing.

The synchronization was perfect, and standing in the middle between the two bands was fantastic! You could spin your character around and the song swirled and was just incredible! I had dismissed the rest of my band, but brought back one so I could run around and listen because if you move a musician while they are playing, you break their playing and you can't re-enter a song.

The friend who was going to bed, Dreamy, then set up so she could record it - she's going to post it on a private YouTube channel! So we moved a little closer and did it a second time. It was so cool, I can't wait to hear the video! We're going to do it on a regular Friday night band jam at the Pony, one of the inns in Bree, but not this week.

Here is a Youtube recording of the album track of Tull: