Introduction

What if you have a few minutes while your waiting for your fellow to meet up with your group? Or you just want to try something other than adventuring for a while. These are good opportunities for the LOTRO music system.

Music is a big part of Tolkien's world, so it is only natural for LOTRO to include a music system. The music system in LOTRO is an astoundingly fun feature that allows you to compose and play just about anything you want with a variety of instruments. It's done so well, that multiple random people can group up and impromptu jam together, and generally sound good.

Also, by using ABC (.abc) files you can play pre-recorded notes on any instrument that you can play. You can even sync your ABC files with other musicians to play a full synchronized song with multiple parts. Incredible, no?

This book is here to help you do well in your LOTRO musical career by giving you a few tips on playing music, as well as providing a list of both solo and group ABC tracks for you and your fellowship to play.

Getting Started Playing Music in LOTRO

Before you can play, you have to learn an instrument. This is easy enough. Once you are level 5, your class trainer will offer to train you in the lute, and either the horn or the clarinet, depending on your class. Minstrels can play any instrument, however.

• Captain, Champion, Guardian: horn
• Burglar, Hunter, Lore-master: clarinet

Once you have trained in an instrument, it will show up on your Passive Skills list. In order to play it, you must own an instrument and have it equipped. At that point you can go to the local bard in any major city and buy the instrument you've been trained in, and equip it by right-clicking it in your inventory.

In order to play, you must also be in music mode. To make this easy, just drag the instrument icon in your inventory to a hotkey bar and use it. Use it again from the bar to exit music mode. You can tell you are in music mode because your character will have the instrument out and appear to be playing it.

Now you can begin playing your instrument by tapping various keys on your keyboard. (See the next section for logical key-mapping of these keys, to make it easier to play.)

Finally, if you want to learn any additional instruments, a minstrel can teach you how. Not all minstrels may know how to teach all instruments, so you might have to track down a pretty skillful one to learn just the instrument you are interested in.

Here is a list of the instruments available in the game:

• bagpipe
• clarinet
• cowbell
• drum
• flute
• harp
• horn
• lute
• theorbo

This should be enough information to get you at least started playing some basic music in LOTRO.