An Elden Ring music fan figured out how to turn his harp into a full controller and defeated Margit using the gamepad-turned-instrument.
Harpist and Elden Ring player u/Lettuce4Dayz shared their achievement in a short video (opens in new tab) on Reddit, showing himself attacking, rolling and controlling his in-game character, playing specific strings from his harp. They are able to defeat Margit the Fell Omen simply by playing the instrument, with no traditional controls involved.
Explaining the process in a commentary, the harper says they used two computer programs to turn their instrument into a gamepad. One detects the pitch of any note played on your harp and converts it to MIDI, while the second links each MIDI sound to a specific keystroke.
“So, for movement, I have a rope that makes me go forward, one backwards, one to the left and one to the right”, they explain. “Each time I rip one of these off, it cancels out the other one so I don’t get stuck trying to move two directions at once.”
“My character keeps walking until I hit a completely different string, which cancels them all out. I also have 4 strings that control camera movement in small increments. Because of that, it’s hard to make sharp turns and do 180 and that’s why I fight hard.”
Roll is linked to a high A note and Light Attack to G. The lower strings, in turn, are reserved for movement and secondary actions such as healing. u/Lettuce4Dayz says it couldn’t find a note for Heavy Attack, because all available (reachable) strings were tied to more essential actions.
Likewise, they cannot jump or control the direction their character rolls, as movement and dodging are activated by two separate ropes. Instead, the character will just roll in the direction they are currently moving.
There is some noticeable input latency involved, however, with the game logging each action quite a while after u/Lettuce4Dayz pulls each string. They say it took some time to adjust to the delay, but they no longer find it as problematic.
Watch the maestro’s work below.
harpist_beats_margit_with_a_literal_harp_not_harp from r/Eldenring
How can you turn an instrument into a controller?
Turning a musical instrument into a fully functional game controller is surprisingly well documented. u/Lettue4Dayz says he followed the YouTuber ThioJoeTech Tutorial (opens in new tab)and used two programs.
MiGiC converts incoming signals to MIDI, while Bome MIDI Translator turns that MIDI into keystroke commands. While MiGiC is free to download, Bome can be downloaded in a free trial.
Once you’ve got everything up and running, however, don’t expect to have an easy time. u/Lettuce4Dayz says the camera controls are quite imprecise, which makes navigating The Lands Between particularly tricky. They often get stuck on objects and have trouble navigating sections of the platform.