I bought sea of thieves upon release and I enjoy seeing how far the game has come, one thing I haven't seen be added that I've wanted since the first few months was the complete ability to play the notes on the instruments if the player desires. In real life I'm a musician and I go to university for it so I may just be biased and have a rare point of view, but I think allowing people who have midi keyboards or controllers to play through all octaves on the instruments or allowing people on controller/computer keyboard to play within a 2 octave range would be cool. Listening to the same 4/5 songs on loop get's boring and repetitive but if you allow the players to create then the community will compose songs and share them, not to mention instruments in games are often significantly easier to play than in real life so mappings would come out for people who aren't as musically inclined as others. With downtime and travel being frequent occurrences in the game what better way is there to pass time than by singing and playing songs with your crew. I think giving the players the ability to actually play the instruments would be amazing and I may be pushing my luck here but if somehow this idea gets picked up I'd also love to see a piano or an organ on the ships so I could sit down and play songs for the crew as we sail to our next destination. Since 3 of the instruments in game are polyphonic (ik hurdy-gurdy is monophonic with droning notes, but shhh no one has to know) then having them be polyphonic in game if they're added would make sense. The timbres of the instruments in sea of thieves are truly beautiful and I would love to be able to create music with my friends while we're having fun and messing around in game. The drum’s could have variations of snare (although i'm pretty sure the sound is a tom for most of the songs), kick, and whistle but i recognize drums may be harder to practically implement. I understand certain people wouldn't want to hear people play their instruments so I think having the ability to mute the instruments of other players is a good idea for the few pirates that don't want to hear anything beyond the base 4 songs.
People on other forums have mentioned 2 issues which seem to be reoccurring points, coordination of players, and practicality of it being added. The coordination of players could be fixed by having a wall mounted clock on the ship that could be used to coordinate a starting point (which I think should also be added since I cook a lot for my crew and I'd prefer to not have to whip my pocket watch out as much as I do), or you can have a 4 beat count in on the instrument. The other issue is practicality. Well, others may view this as impractical, but the sea is vast and open and if you play the game as much as I do, you find yourself with a lot of downtime as you sail. I think within this downtime the game can get very very boring, an easy way to alleviate the boredom would be by learning melodies and being able to play while sailing to your next location. Eventually after enough time put in, one of your crew mates will learn how to make that hurdy-gurdy speak to your soul.
Another idea that someone brought up,which was very good imo was the idea that with controller, if it is implemented they could make the looking location relate to the octave ranges you can play on computer keyboard/controller. Meaning looking down or looking low can get lower octaves while looking at an elevated level would allow for higher range octaves, and obviously looking within a vertical range that's close to or at level with your eyes would make the middle octaves accessible.
