Please bring back the ability to use same notes on multiple keybinds! [Performance]
TL;DR Incoming. I'm sorry! Please read the full story, though. :(
Hi friends. Today I'm bringing up a concern that I've been meaning to bring up ever since Performance was reworked in January. The reason why I haven't brought this up until now is because I wasn't too sure how to word this issue where both people who have knowledge in music and people who don't can follow exactly what I'm saying. However, after giving it much thought, (months now) I figured now is the time I can actually explain where I'm coming from on this issue and give a grand insight to players who do enjoy performance, but feel either hindered or a lack of chance/ability to really get into performance without the use of 3rd party programs and breaking ToS.
I feel like performance, especially now, has a lot of potential for the musically gifted. However, a lot of musically gifted players are incapable of performing to their fullest potential, at least the ones who are not using Third Party Programs (which is, of course, against ToS.) I guarantee you every single bard performer that you guys see that is playing both harmony and melody in a song is using some sort of Third Party Program to achieve such a sound, where as before it was TOTALLY POSSIBLE to perform like this without the use of third party programs. Whether these third party programs are used to either set up macros to play a song or using it to connect a MIDI Keyboard to the game and using the MIDI keyboard to perform, ToS is still broken here in order to achieve what we used to be capable of doing.
You might ask me, "Acha, what do you mean? How is that even possible? The old system was terrible and delayed! There's no way the old system was better than the new system!"
Well my friends, you are right. The new interface is actually great! I love the idea behind it, especially with the newest update! The sound files are so crisp and clear. We're even able to hold a key down if we're wanting to play a half note or a whole note, too! This is an amazing step to really bringing something fun and exciting as a past time for those who want to play music!
But.... only being able to use one note on only one key hinders the ability to easily access other notes without doing some sort of complicated and insanely fast mixture of ridiculous key strokes that even a typing prodigy would have difficulties doing and using.
ESPECIALLY if you're trying to play both a melody and harmony.
You see, in music, there is always some sort of rhythmical pattern to be followed. Before, I was easily able to set up these rhythmical patterns on my hotbars and literally perform a whole song, with both harmony and melody, without any problems. I am very sad that they did remove the ability to drag notes individually to our hotbars because now.... I'm not able to organize my notes in this rhythmical pattern that I once had the ability to do.
Sure, we can pretend our piano interface in performance is exactly the same as playing a piano irl. However, this actually isn't practical, not on a typing keyboard anyway. Why is it not practical? Because an IRL piano has easy accessibility. I can hit any note, only one time, and get the sound I'm looking for. Not only that, but I am also able to use all my fingers to achieve such a sound that the ears will pick up as actual music. The accessibility on the piano interface in game, especially for intricate performances, is not as easily accessible, especially since we have to use CTRL and ALT variants of notes to access lower and higher octaves or use different keybinds to only access the sharp or flat versions of the notes.
Now, of course, I know with this recent update we can customize our keys even further on the piano interface. But still, even doing it this way, the accessibility is not the same as it would be on an IRL piano/MIDI keyboard.
Backstory
Here is a little back story why I'm so passionate about this subject; my Cactuar character's name is Rose Gold. She isn't my main at all, but simply an Alt to use when I'm doing ranked PvP on the Aether datacenter. A while back, while I was waiting in ranged queue, I wanted to show some of this music I could truly perform to the crowd in Limsa Lower Decks. After a couple of songs, I was astounded by the crowd that had swarmed me due to my playing. Eventually, some really sweet people posted pictures and commented on the music I was playing in a facebook group and on Reddit to let the community know what had happened on that day. My goodness was I overwhelmed by how positive people were responding to my music; as a musician I can not begin to describe the incredible feeling it is to have people recognize and genuinely enjoy the music you performed.
I didn't have to use third party programs to play these intricate performances as I had the ability to put a lot of the same notes on my hotbar with different keybinds. It was so easy to access whatever notes I needed for different songs! And if I felt like changing the song I was playing, I would just reorganize my notes to what ever key signature the new song was in and play that different song. There was nothing to it, no struggling, no hindering, just pure playing of both harmony and melody without the use of third party programs, all of it was straight from my typing keyboard.
Now that notes are bound to only one key on its own, the ability to play such intricate performances without the use of 3rd party programs is nearly impossible. My ability to perform has plummeted, and now I'm only able to play a melody of a song, instead of actually being able to treat the songs as if I were on my own piano performing and doing both Harmony and Melody.
As extreme as this may sound, my heart literally did break the moment the new performance update came out. No longer would I be able to perform the way I used to.... No longer would I see those people who asked me to play songs for them again. No longer would I attract a crowd to listen to me perform. And as hard as I've tried to get used to the new performance UI, for months now, I still have not been able to come anywhere close to where I used to be.
Unfortunately I do not have any video evidence that I can use to show everyone great examples of what I'm talking about. However I do have a screenshot below that might provide some insight into what I'm actually trying to explain.
Please click on this link to view an example of how this was set up.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I have the Middle C note circled. I have circled this note to show how I was able to place these notes wherever I needed them to be in order to access them easily. The underlined portions in the screenshot shows the rhythmical patterns I was able to do. As you can see, a lot of these patterns are split up into sets of four. (For you people who know music terms, these usually were just a single measure or two that repeated.) The ones that are longer than just four notes are a mixture of harmony and melody. But still, as you can see each pattern represented a new "phase" in the song I was performing.
Again, the issue of accessibility is shown here. Due to being able to keybind whatever note I needed in different areas, I was able to easily access these notes and perform the songs I wanted to perform.
SUGGESTIONS
My suggestion to the developers of the game is, along side the new performance UI, grant us a new set of "hotbars" while we're in performance mode. That way we can choose between the simple version of the piano UI, the expanded version of the UI, OR the hotbar version where we can drag our notes individually to whichever section we need. I was able to use literally all the hotbars available in the game at the time when we were to drag our notes to the hotbar, so providing us with 12 hotbars in this "new performance UI" will really help those bards bring back the music that we once were able to do.
Thank you all for reading this extremely long post and I do apologize about the length.
Too long, Didn't Read? NP, Here you go!
TL;DR Version: New performance UI prevents performers from playing both melody and harmony at the same time without the use of 3rd party programs due to accessibility. When performance was dependent on the hotbars, users were able to create rhythmical patterns to create a very intricate, beautiful sounding performance without being bound to 3rd party programs. I am requesting the new performance UI to include a hotbar version that was similar to the original way performance was handled so that bard performers will have the accessibility to perform intricate songs with Melody and Harmony in them again without the use of 3rd party programs.
