Notation

In this section we will discuss how to use the Clan Lord notation to write actual music you can use in the game. For the technical requirements and how to really use your work, please have a look here. To follow along with the examples we will provide here, you might want to be ingame in the bards fields basement with an instrument at hand or use a programm like Clan Lord Tune Helper / CLTH (Mac) or the Java Bard Tool by Atoro (Windows & probably Linux).

Notes

In theory the use of notes is pretty straight forward in CL notation. To play a c, you can simply use the letter c. If you want the c to be followed by a g, write cg. To determine the length of a note, simply put a number between 1 and 9 for the amount of beats right after the note, the default value here is 2, so c equals c2. A short way to write a note with the length of 4 beats, you can also use the capital letter that describes that note, e.g. C being the same as c4. A capital letter with a length will be treated just like a lowercase letter with a length though.

And example for this might look like this:

c8DEc8e6fDfgEDc8

Now you can also alter the pitch of every note by a semitone. To raise it, use # between the note and its length, to lower it, use a . as an equivalent of ♭. If we take our short melody from above and lower every e to an e flat (e♭), we will get the following result:

c8DE.c8e.6fDfgE.Dc8

Pauses

While notes are extremely important, pauses are almost as valuable and very much underated. Well placed pauses can provide structure for a whole piece or a short rhythm and create tension and release (a very good formula for writing music by the way). As an example have a listen at the first seconds of For Those Who Departed Forever by Bingro. But to stay with our example from earlier, we may change it to the following:

c8p4de.c8e.6fDpf1g1E.Dc8

You can use pauses in the same way as notes by using the character p and a length with 2 being the default if no length is set.

Octaves

In Clan Lord we can use the range of three octaves reaching from c to b. They are indicated by three different characters while everything coming after \ will be in the lowest octave, the middle one is activated by = and the highest with /. If no octave is specified yet, Clan Lord will always use the middle octave per default. Some instruments are even capable to play one more note above the /-scale by using /b#.

\cdefgab=cdefgab/cdefgabb#

Also you can go one octave up by using + or down with -.

=cdefgab+cdefedc-bagfedc

So now we can play our little melody in three different pitches:

\c8p4de.c8e.6fDpf1g1E.Dc8p8=c8p4de.c8e.6fDpf1g1E.Dc8p8/c8p4de.c8e.6fDpf1g1E.Dc8

Other helpful stuff

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