Hello, and welcome to the Bards’ Guild’s “Bardic Compendium”. Below you will find various guides and resources on creating and performing music in Final Fantasy XIV.
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This text was written by Mevari Navalo, “Sharlayan Archon of Music” and current Guildmaster for the Bards’ Guild. Mevari has been playing music in Final Fantasy XIV since 2019, and currently runs his own band named “Mevari and the Archons” when not managing the guild. Starting out as a soloist, then creating an quartet, then a sextet, then finally a full octet, Mevari has arranged all sorts of music for various sizes of bands and genres, and has been around long enough to see dramatic change in both the bard performance system and the bard performance community.
In real life, however, Mevari is not a professional musician. He is a computer programmer by trade, and has a musical background limited to being a choir boy in high school and a semester of piano in college. It’s this fact that makes Mevari so confident in his belief that nearly anyone can dive into the bard performance scene, regardless of prior musical experience.
This guide gives a broad overview of how barding works. We will begin with how the performance system in FFXIV functions on a technical level, the limitations you must work around, a brief introduction to each of the instruments in the game, as well as what tools/software you can use.
This guide will teach you how to edit your first midis, and give you general tips and tricks useful for the often frustrating task of editing down a song into the playable range of a solo instrument.
Volume 2 - Midi Editing for Soloists
This guide will tell you what you need to know to start editing music for multiple bards, ranging from simple duets to full octets. You’ll be introduced to BMP format, the midi format used by every major bard program, as well as the basics of instrument selection and of course midi editing itself.
Volume 3 - Midi Editing for Ensemble