Main Menu: This is really beautiful. The violin is really well-produced - I love the slides up and down when there are big leaps. This track reminds me of one of the most beautiful video game village themes I think I’ve heard - Bringing Color to the Wind and Grassland from Monster Hunter X.

Welcome to the Band: This is such a creative idea! The call and response works really well and the interactive component makes this feel like a game in itself. The key changes were smooth and overall this was a really fun track!

Three Abreast: I was intrigued by this track because it strays from the predictable and gets into some unfamiliar territory for me. I think the playability was appropriate, though the expectation of where we were going was a little murkier on this one.

The Tavern: The tavern ambience is a really nice touch that sets the bard scene exceptionally well. The 5/4 time signature is a fun change. I especially like the flute and fiddle melody while the play-along is in the bass. Thank goodness I was not expected to play the upper part!

Wedding of the Forest Elves: Wow 7/4 is something different. And the phrygian sound is another really fun twist as well. I think it was creative to make this harmonic choice for the game setting, since this harmonic sound is often a cliche for desert music, it would be welcomed in a different setting!

The Dwarven Mining Town: Okay this is where my play-along skills drop off. I love the big industrial sound of this mining town. I just sat back and enjoyed this one and I think it is my favorite play-along theme (I think the main menu is my favorite overall).

Court of the Kanum: Wow I would absolutely love to see someone actually play this! I think the accompanying instruments were some of my favorites in this track. The strings and big hits were especially well-made in my opinion.

This is one of the most unique submissions I’ve heard in the jam because of the interactivity and exploration into different harmonic spaces and different time signatures. You took the graduated difficulty very seriously and I would be impressed with anyone who could keep up the whole way! I’m impressed that you were able to put all of this together in just a week. Great work on this overall and thank you for sharing your music!

Excellent concept for your submission, very impressed by it and the execution (it was like the duets tracks from my submission but taken to another level wow) !

The tracks are all very nice, the music battle aspect was very well executed (reminded me of The Devil Went Down To Georgia or Guitar Hero boss tracks in general) : the parts to play are nicely composed and memorable enough to not be a bunch of notes put there to be difficult, so great job on that. The rise in intensity/difficulty was quite well handled, and there was a lot of very enjoyable variety among the different tracks.

I leave this comment as is but I will try later to play it on guitar (very fortunate that you put the tab notation on here, my non-sightreading brain would have been very lost otherwise), I will tell you how this goes in another comment.

Excellent work and can't wait to try it out, great job !

I tried to give it a fair shot but unfortunately I am not very good at sight reading so i fell of quite quickly, but I think the concept is so cool! And very well executed too! I loved the medieval-fantasy vibe and each track is very unique. Acoustic instruments are obviously very hard to imitate with vsts especially when they take the main melody lines, but I think the way you utilized them in your submission is very fitting for this kind of game and vibe.

As a baroque player myself, the cover art took my attention, so here we are lol

The Main Menu theme  got me hooked after, like, 0:01 seconds hahahaha It gave me Final Fantasy I and Ys: The Ark Of Napishtim vibes. Love how you lead the rhythm, it just flowed. 0:30 hit me in a weird way... Still realizing whether I like it or not, honestly! But that's such a solid composition. To me, it feels a lot like a town theme more than a main menu theme.
Love the flute playing in "Welcome To The Band",  love the scale you used in "The Dwarven Mining", not to mention the percussive elements. This last track is definitely something you'd hear in Final Fantasy IX. I don't really enjoy this kind of music in videogames (not in the way you listen to it while driving), but it was so well crafted that it just made me genuinely smile!
Was it just me hearing some Caravan in "Court of the Kanum"? lol

I loved this submission, man! Please keep going!!! 

Main Menu: Gorgeous composition. Nice percussion.

Welcome to the Band: I like the feel of the bass a lot. Such a jolly tune!

Three Abreast: Time sig really contributes to the riding feel. So does the almost galloping melody!

The Tavern: Complex time sig here is cool! Love the violin work, and the crowd sfx is a nice touch.

Wedding Of The Forest Elves: Man I would enjoy making a battle theme inspired off that intro section, it sounds so cool. Love the Phrygian Dominant use especially combined with that time sig. Definitely my favorite track here.

The Dwarven Mining Town: Love the Mixolydian use as well as the I-iv. This is such a cool track. Somehow reminds me of Super Mario RPG. Nice percussion.

Court of the Kanum: More Phrygian Dominant! Love it. Melody is so nice especially when the countermelody comes in. 

So good! I really like the idea of playing along. Great work!

Always fun when someone goes beyond the assignment so to speak, really love the instrumentation here, and the compositions are really nicely put together! I also really wanted to do a tavern track, but couldn't find the time too/was too slow this jam hahahah, fantastic track! As for the sound of the instruments, it's really tough to get the realism out of certain sampled solo instruments (especially if isolated enough). Just lots of time spent on modulation, and having several good libraries I guess, because I've noticed people who do music for a living will usually have a lot of different solo violins who all excel at different things, then stringing those together. But money doesn't grow on trees right? But yeah, as far as cohesion goes, I have no complaints at all! 

Fantastic soundtrack, fun throughout the whole listen, congrats! :)

This is such a fun idea, the Tavern was definitely my favorite track of them all. I'm pretty unfamiliar with SWAM strings, but I think there was definitely more that could be done with the string sound as they sound a little too much like a keyboard soundfont imo. In any case I had a blast playing along on keyboard, though I don't know if you had any specific instrument in mind for play along purposes. I thought everything was super doable and fun. It might help user playability to add slurs but it's super intuitive even without. Fantastic entry!

This is textbook storytelling, all the tracks are coherent while having their own unique vibes and characteristics, letting players feel like they are going along a journey with the music! Also impressive composition and spot on with the choice of instruments. Absolutely love this OST.

Oh, that was so fun! Amazing compositions. It made me feel like I was travelling along and enjoying the journey with some music band at the medieval ages. Also travelled to some exotic lands, specially at the Wedding of the forest elves and the Court of the Kanum. The energy is contagious and I found myself head-bobbing in many parts of it (specially at the dwarven song), and the "duet" feel of almost every track is addictive! I also found the balance between rests and melodic phrases super well done. You said you wanted feedback about the instrumentation. To me every instrument sounded good enough, quite natural and easy on the ears (listened to all the tracks twice), but if I was to nit-pick, I would say I found these instruments with room for improvement:

1 Main Menu:

String pad appearing at 0:05, sounding a bit "synthy" and artificial.

3 Three Abreast:

This might be due to the song lacking a mid-range instrument filling up, but the high-end melody of the solo fiddle ends up being a bit unpleasant, but not necessarily because of its shrill texture. This gets accentuated at 0:55 when you add the piccolo , another high voice  on top of the already high fiddle. Maybe fiddle could be lowered an octave, EQ applied or some other instrument added to fill the middle ground to attenuate this effect.

6 The Dwarven Mining Town

Violin entering at 2:35 sounds a bit synthetic as well.

7 Court of the Kanum

Plucked instrument at 1:21 also has some artificiality in it, all notes sounding too stable. Orchestra hits at 1:47 and 1:48 have also something which sounds off, but I am not sure of what exactly.

In the playability front, I am afraid I have not much feedback to give you without studying a bit the songs first, as I suck at sight-reading, but if I had something to say as a criticism, it is that the interface of the game/videos would improve greatly if the image of the bard on the donkey did not take so much screen, and the music notation was bigger, focusing on less bars. As it is now, the notes are quite difficult to read.

Overall, I had a blast with your entry and I thank you for the creativity and the amazing folk compositions. They felt fresh and full of interesting and catchy melodic ideas. Great work!

Except for the Court of the Kanum, which is really great but has more of a sensual mood, hearing all your remaining your music brings me tremendous joy, and a true feeling of being in a medieval environment. I can't choose a favourite, this is a weak spot for me, I love these vibes. One could endlessly dance until morrow to your songs, one after another. What a wonderful, sometimes funny, collection of themes! Very, very well done, liamt15!

What a fun and engaging idea ! So original :D

My favorites are the Wedding of the  Forest Elves and the Dwarven Mining Town. The scales  for the Elves are ton of to play and you've made great hooks with it! And I looove what the harmony that the orchestra does during the funny 'Bell jingle' (high pink notes) passage. So fun, it fits the dwarves so much :)

Some parts where I needed two hands doing differents things were too much jaha, but that's on first listen. I mean, I could be tempted to try and geek out the hell out of that game and become a fk'n BARD HERO !! Completing the insane Court of the Kanum ! Errr seems damn hard ^^

That was an excellent and refreshing idea ! It also fits the theme a lot, and you've cooked with the folk aspect. Overall very complete and creative project my friend, amazing :)

About the feedback you're looking for, I don't know.. maybe this folk music style clashes less with the vst instruments you used, to me sounded good and coherent as a vibe. Only the piano felt a bit flat/out of context? but I took it as the 'tutorial instrument' dialoguing the musician, as if an instrument was breaking the 4th wall to invite us to play along.

Super cool !

This is the most fun I think I've ever had with a submission in any music jam ever. I was engaged with the music as I struggled to correctly hit a single section, but it was so fun!
I wasn't thinking about anything else besides the music because I was fully engaged with it throughout then entire thing

Not only that, but the music was really really good too! I especially like the runs on the final song and the Dwarven mining town was probably my favorite overall.

Impression is usually the most difficult thing for me to rate max stars. That's based on how engaged I was throughout the OST. I really only give 5 stars to that if I actively relisten to tracks to hear specific parts and want to go back again and again. With this entry, I didn't need to do that at all because I was incredibly engaged from the start.

I even broke my rule of commenting only on the youtube video for fear of being locked out of commenting because I needed to post this comment here as well.

Fantastic entry!

This is an amazing submission, I really liked the folk vibe throughout the ost.

My favorite tracks were the 2nd one (Welcome To The Band) and the 4th one (The Tavern). I really like dancy folk tracks. I was also pleasantly surprised in the 4th track :D, didn't expect to see 7/4 and 5/4. Was really refreshing and fit really well in the track. The 5th track (Wedding Of The Forest Elves) was also really cool, I just would have loved to see a speed-up in tempo at the end to express even more that race/competition feeling (if that's what you were looking for ?). The 6th track (The Dwarven Mining Town) was lovely. In this one, I would have prefered at least one romantic section with a longer/more expressive flute melody to refresh our ears from the main ost rhythm and its call/response pattern. But I'm currently just trying to find constructive things to say, it's actually incredibly good. The storytelling was also wonderful, I really thought I was there listening to that bard playing for many different customers.

Amazing job, thank you for sharing !

This is such a fun submission! I had a great time playing along on my piano, though the last piece was pretty difficult to keep up with haha. I loved the overall energy of the soundtrack, and the way you explored different timbres and moods in the later tracks was pulled off really well. Great job, and thanks for sharing!

Hey! I had so much fun playing through this, and honestly, it was a SUPER smart idea, absolutely genius. The one shame about this jam is that you never get to play through any of the games, because they aren't real. You solved that problem in the most clever way. I normally listen through the full album and leave comments for each track, but in your case, let me just say you've got a knack for writing fun, catchy melodies, and really nailed that taverny bard sound, with each track having a distinct vibe. Super incredible, and I am READY for the sequel!

I remember your comission from last year too, what a huge step up ! Fun concept, cool execution, way better sound choice and use (especially the violin). So yeah, take my stars ! 

I played along with a chromatic accordion and a saz, was fun and pretty balanced, each music becoming harder. The Elven theme is really hard to play along on some european folk instrument because of scale (I think you used the Makam Hijaz ?) but tbf that's not a true issue, I just took my saz and it was way better.  Well played ! 

Was quite surpirised to see you in my random queue; I remembered your submission from last year very well, since it left quite an impression, and with that in mind: This one absolutely mogs it lmao, it's soooooo good. Your compositional abilities were already pretty great last year, but now in addition with your better instruments, it genuinely sounds pretty convincingly real at a lot of points

The solo violin is just absolutely wonderful, it absolutely steals the show whenever it's there. If it's a vst (I honestly can't tell) I would love it if you told me its name, although I'm sure you've fiddled with it quite a bit to make it sound the way it does.... It's honestly so good that it kind of overshadowed the bard's guitar a bit quality wise lol, but it's not a huge issue

The story is honestly pretty charmingly medieval and lighthearted, and the way it was presented is pretty inovative compared to what I've seen this year and the previous one, I wish I could participate in the play along experimentation, but I've never actually played an instrument in my life... What a shame. I hope people who did participate share the experience, it looks like a lot of fun. Sadly, it also means that I won't be able to comment on the playability.

It's hard to pick a favourite, but I'll mention some songs that made me go "woah"

Three Abreast seems to have a very interesting scale, it somehow oozes mystery and uncertanity... I really liked it, so I might experiment in making something simillar with my own songs in the future

The Tavern's constant switch up between time signatures made it into a very bouncy tune, although my favourite parts were usually the ones in 5/4

Wedding of the Forest Elves was quite a jumpscare: I live in algeria, a predominantly arabic country, Its use of the "Arabic Scale" (or locryan? no idea, I larp music theory) kinda took me out and made it feel I was watching tv advertisement back home since that's the only kinda songs they tend to use for those lol. Great track, all in all!

Court of the Kanum's choro-inspired bassline was a nice surprise, it lend itself pretty welll. Wish we'd get a continuation to the story...

Anyway, great stuff, it's nice to see you imrpoving to such a degree, so congratulations!

I love the idea of playing along this! Wish i could do that :( Still, it's a great submission