Trombone Champ turns all songs into tooting works of genius | Hacker News Reader

Trombone Champ turns all songs into tooting works of genius

polygon.com

My senior project in college was "Trombone Hero", which was a game based on guitar hero. I had an old trombone, and I took apart a cheap gamepad and put the sensors along a custom PVC pipe slide at positions 1 - 7. There was then a button attached to it that you would press for "blowing".

I then made a little tool that would play music and record inputs to generate the "levels". I used some Beatles songs I had on a CD, and then recorded each note individually on a real trombone to superimpose on the song.

I made the game engine with some Java graphics library that I don't remember. I was really proud of this when I made it, and is always a fun story to tell.

I found an old video from ~2012 when I demoed it to the class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rawTtdv50s

Does it use real slide positions? I'm guessing not. (The slide is only long enough to change pitch by a small amount. Lip tension is used to select a resonant mode at each slide position.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc1EPud2VAQ&t=8s

No, it’s just a single continuous “slide”.

Would be cool to have an expert mode where the keyboard is used to select lip tension and the slide works as on a real instrument. With a simple physical model, would make hitting the right notes easier since there's a natural 'pull' to the resonances.

The Onion is ahead of the times - from 2007: https://www.theonion.com/activision-reports-sluggish-sales-f...

You can tell the devs are trombone players because the trombonist gets to play the melody.

The first tweeted video, by Jacob DeRose, "William Tell Overture", is the counter-melody at best.

Does Nasty actually mean you messed up or did something dope?

From the article: mess up and game will proclaim it “nasty.”

However, nasty can be good: “4. an expression of approval or impressment with regard to a person's actions or ability” https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nasty

Welcome to auto antonyms.

Cleave to the traditional uses of words! Don't cleave their meanings!

Should we sanction such usages, or should they be sanctioned?

The game is fun for sure. I fully expect someone to hack-up a hardware DIY trombone interface. You might be able to get pretty close doing something has improvised as taping a mouse to a cardboard tube with a small hole in the side that allows the mouse sensor to read movement from another cardboard tube inside the first.

There is somebody who rigged up a mic, and some code to listen for loud sounds and use the pitch to set mouse position :) https://twitter.com/kupobucks/status/1573060085177262082

But a DIY controller with a mouse taped to a physical thing would also be fun and I eagerly await the video

> Trombone Champ has been released for PC via Steam! … > > A Mac release is currently being researched. Further ports are possible but not currently planned.

Uh, why not? This would be perfect for touch screens. And accelerometers. Just imagine the Joy-Con chaos.

https://twitter.com/lawrenceyang/status/1572438040173490182 Seems like the accelerometer part can be done with the PC version already :D

Probably just by mapping the accelerometer to a virtual joystick. Steam Input is a fairly powerful framework for mapping new controls onto existing control schemes.

for starters, it's using an _inverted mouse_ by default, which has to be intentional to add to the ridiculousness of the entire experience

playing with a touch screen would be ez mode

Anybody remembering Microsoft's Songsmith?

https://youtu.be/Ci1K9Zcwvy4?t=17

https://youtu.be/mg0l7f25bhU?t=27

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Songsmith

I can see a whole family of games built on difficult instruments.

Just for yucks, I took a couple French Horn lessons, because I knew the teacher Scott. I bought a new one from Walmart for ~$200, which Scott bought back from me because he can always sell them. I told him I had no commitment to learning it, and he was fine with that.

Man, that is one hard instrument. Compared to the 'bone? I couldn't say.

The French horn is a popular answer to "what's the hardest orchestral instrument?".

It has longer tubing and therefore a lower fundamental frequency than a trombone, but typically plays in a higher range.

The higher above the fundamental frequency of a brass instrument you play, the more notes can be played with a single fingering. So the French horn requires very precise lip control to get the right note.

I was a trumpet player in band and had a "Lemme try..." moment after one of the French horn players told us this. It was indeed much harder. It was sort of fun to have her do the fingerings while I tried to make sensible sounds come out of the thing.

French horn has a buttery warmth I love when played well. Sounds the first cry of some newborn hellspawn in the arms of an neophyte.

My persistence level was very low, as I said. So bear with me if I tell you that the song "Beautiful Dreamer" was the killer. I just could NOT hit that C on "dream-ER."

Scott's played with every big orchestra in the Bay Area, as a sub. When their regular horn player can't make it, he's the one they call.

I hope all you horn players (or would-be players) are familiar with Flanders & Swann's take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjA6bA1qtfQ

Thanks, never heard of them.

It could use a transcript, though.

I learned to type on my first non-traditional keyboard using a previous game from these devs, "Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing". Similar offbeat sense of humor (though, if playing Sousa marches taught me anything, shouldn't the horns be off-beat instead?) It was a Flash game but there surely must still be a way to play it.

QWOP, but music :)

seems like a missed opportunity for Tromboner

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