The Mandachord is terrible for people unfamiliar with music AND people who know music.
Watching my fiancee work with the Mandachord was an amazing thing. She’s studying music in college and doesn’t really Warframe at all, but she was super interested in Octavia and the Mandachord because of how DE had been discussing them during dev streams. So I decided to sit back and let her futz around in the Mandacord UI to see how it would go.
She gave up in about a half hour in frustration.
Here’s just a summary of venting.
The UI is bad. Needing to scroll around to work with each measure is hugely problematic because you can’t view the entire thing in one glance to correct a problem spot. Notably, this becomes a real issue if your fourth and first measure don’t loop perfectly, requiring you to go back and edit a lot of the song in some cases.
Only 16th notes. Why? Not even percussionists start by learning 16th notes. There’s no way to actually hold a note out if you wanted to, creating some really awful sounding songs. In a similar vein, no way to put in rests and make a noise stop. A lot of the instruments have a hanging echo to them, especially the default “melody” track, which causes bleedover for each note.
It’s somewhat hard to see where each quarter-note spacing is (the four sections of the measure). There are so many lines on this thing.
D minor pentatonic. Why are we using a more complicated scale than just a standard do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti scale? Why no half steps? This part, combined with the sixteenth note restriction, makes things sound really off in a lot of cases. It also makes certain compositions completely impossible.
No tempo options.
Calling the last section “melody” is a little weird because a bass section can be the melody.
The default sound pack isn’t great, and the instrument options are extremely limited.
In summary, DE tried to find a balance between things being too complex and requiring musical knowledge to know, and things being too simplistic. They borked up both ends. “It’s literally only good for Sandstorm loops.”
Warframe Mandachord – MORTAL KOMBAT:
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