To unlock the performance system, all you need is one thing: the bard job.
To unlock bard, first unlock the archer class in Gridania at the Archers’ Guild, then level it up to level 30. Complete your job quests to unlock bard, and once you have obtained your job stone, equip it.
Finally, talk with a man named Simpkin in Gridania, who is standing across from the Mih Khetto's Amphitheatre, and he will unlock performance mode for you.
With those steps completed, you immediately have the full selection of instruments unlocked for you, available in your ‘Actions & Traits’ menu under ‘Performance’. You can click and drag any of these instruments to your hotbar, or you can use the ‘Actions & Traits’ menu to pull them out.
Fig 1: Performance Settings window with “assign all notes to keyboard” enabled. Your key bindings don’t have to match this.
The first thing you should do is pull out your harp. When you do, a tiny little keyboard will pop up on the screen. This keyboard is only 13 notes, so you will want to click on the gear icon above your keyboard and click on “Assign all notes to keyboard” to enable the full keyboard of 37 notes (fig 1). From there you can assign buttons on your keyboard however you wish, however some software may require you to bind your keyboard a certain way.
If you’re familiar with the piano, you might be asking where the rest of the keyboard is. And, sadly, you’re looking at all of it. Every single instrument in the game, from the harp to the trombone, has exactly 37 notes spanning three octaves, from a low C to a high C.
If you’re used to working with the full range of a grand piano, which typically has 88 keys, this is not very much. Essentially we’re given tiny little toy pianos, and we do our best to make them sound good. Even for instruments where this octave range roughly makes sense, it rarely matches up with the actual range of that instrument. For example, the full range that a professional viola player can play is from C3 to A6, while the range of the in-game viola is from C3 to C6. Translated, this means that there are some higher notes that you can play on a real-life viola that you CAN’T play on the FFXIV viola.
The limitation of your in-game range is, by far, the biggest challenge in terms of making music playable in FFXIV, but there is another major one as well: the lack of chords.
Try pulling out any instrument and playing any two notes at the same time. What you will find is that you simply CAN’T. The game will only allow you to play one note at a time, with the best you can do being playing two or more notes in rapid succession.
Fig 2: A chord.
For many instruments this makes sense. You can’t play a chord on a flute, after all. However, for anyone trying to arrange a full song as played on a piano or guitar, this is a pain. Even string instruments like violins can play two-note “dyad” chords in real life.
As mentioned before, the best way you can handle chords is to play all the notes one at a time in rapid succession. This is called an “arpeggiated chord”, coming from the Italian word “arpeggiare” which means “to play on a harp”. As the name suggests, you are ‘strumming’ the chord, either from low to high or high to low, as if you were playing it on a harp… which, considering the harp is one of the instruments in the game, you very well could be. This process is often handled automatically by bard software such as BMP, arpeggiating chords for you. This means you can leave chords in your midis, as long as you’re okay with them being played like this.
Arpeggiated chords work best on certain instruments, namely the harp, lute, and piano, all of which have ‘reverb’ to them which makes arpeggiated chords sound nice. Outside of these instruments, the best way to handle chords is to just get more bards and split the note up between multiple instruments. Sometimes an arpeggiated chord might work fine on an instrument with no reverb, though, so feel free to experiment.
Fig 3: Starting ensemble mode
For all these limitations, Square has gifted us with a tool that has made barding easier: Ensemble Mode. By opening your in-game metronome, clicking “Ensemble Ready Check” and then “Begin” (fig 3), you can prompt everyone in your current party who also has an instrument out to start ensemble mode with you. If everyone accepts, the metronome starts ticking, and all notes you play will be in sync. If you all play a note on the same metronome tick, the game will sync all your notes up automatically, which massively simplifies trying to play an ensemble and get your band all synced. The downside is this limits the size of bands to 8 players, but you probably shouldn’t be making bands bigger than that for multiple reasons.
In our next lesson, we will cover different types of bards, as well as what software they use.