Hello fellow Hearthlings,
It has been a while since we got a new instrument.
Personally I would love a piano, but that is way past the setting as has been said before by Jorb.
However, thinking about instruments of the time, one of them stood out to me that might bring some new life to this part of the game: The hurdy gurdy.
(though a translation of the german word might be a bit more descriptive: turning lyre)
This would in essense be a violine with a wheel for a bow playing continues notes by constantly turning said wheel with a hand crank. It has keys to play notes on the main string (it would be nice to be able to play more than 2 notes at the same time and even that is restricted to the fiddle) and several secondary strings that can be best thought of as the extra pipes on a bagpipe.
It would be absolutly amazing to have a way to change the rotation on the handcrank somehow to have small "cuts" in the melody, but one cannot have too much fun.
Btw, before someone says that a hurdy gurdy is somehow late to the period in which we play here, may I remind you that we have the very much 18th century Harmonica in the game ...
Onto the second grander proposal:
I might aswell get it out of the way because it will sound oddly specific anyway. This isn't really my idea, but something I have actually done in another game. In MapleStory 2 (yes, that Meme of a game that got shut down by now) it was possible to write music sheets and even copy them, share those with other players and perform together. The way it was implemented there made it pretty much possible to have a databank online to download the instructions from to play anything. I myself had a good day of fun making a Phoenix Wright character and letting him play ace attourny's main theme, but to get back to the point: I would love to see something similar in Haven, but with restrictions akin to painting.
As Jorb said, the idea behind paintings was not to have people just upload full size jpegs and have those displayed ingame.
As some people may be aware, you are limited in the materials you need and the stats you need to have to make a painting. How high the requirements are is determined by the amount of fields and contours. Similarly, the writing of sheet music could be restricted by the amount of dye used, set a hard limit for notes in a sheet and/or the psyche level of the writer.
A failsafe would also be a good idea. Just incase this would be used for griefing in any way, an option to mute instruments specifically.
However, seeing how we have quite a few custom client makers, I am sure they could take care of such a feature themselves, if you needed to cut off some time for such a big project.
Hope you will consider as this part of the game is sorely lacking. It is hard enough as it is to play anything without the use of thrid party software that lets you use a midi insturment to circumvent the softlock in single octaves.