MissMikkaa, the streamer who defeated the Elden Ring uber-boss Malenia using a level one character and a dance pad (opens in new tab), has yet another bizarre boss kill to her repertoire: This time, she’s taken down Margit, the Fell Omen, with an acoustic guitar.
See for yourself:
We did it! Killed Margit today with an Acoustic Guitar! This might be the most inconsistent and hardest run so far hahaha, very fun! The plan is to beat Elden Ring by only using the guitar as a controller. pic.twitter.com/xF9FB8JeBqFebruary 2, 2023
You’ll notice that MissMikkaa is using a real acoustic guitar here, and not some kind of Guitar Hero-style controller. You might then naturally wonder how it works. The answer, she said in another tweet (opens in new tab), is a program called Abject Audio Inputs (opens in new tab), which binds audio frequencies to keyboard inputs. Basically, you can use any sound to control your keyboard, recorded or live, “as long as you are able to keep a certain consistency in your tone.”
“My guitar is connected via an XLR cable to my gaming PC,” MissMikkaa explained while demonstrating the setup during a recent livestream. “Basically how the software works is that it has these frequencies that it looks for, for this specific [in-game] action, which is W. So when it hits that frequency, for example when I do a G [chord]—you saw that it hit it—that means it does a W [keypress] for four seconds. Now if I want to attack, I have it assigned to the second frequency, which is A minor, and that’s just a tap. And now we can heal, which is R, which is the third line [in the software], which is a C chord on the guitar. You see?”
MissMikkaa acknowledged how ridiculous it looks to play Elden Ring with a string instrument. “I mean, I can understand how it can look like, or be unbelievable, but it’s definitely not fake. Instead of saying, ‘this is not real,’ you can say, ‘How does this work?'”
In case it needs to be said, playing Elden Ring with a guitar and some weird software is clearly not easy. MissMikkaa was able to take down Margit, but I spent 15 minutes watching her battle Godrick the Grafted with a guitar during her Twitch (opens in new tab) stream, and she got absolutely rocked throughout. She eventually moved on to more conventional guitar-driven exploration, but even that was clearly a struggle—although to be perfectly honest she’s doing better with the guitar than I ever did using a conventional controller (opens in new tab).
It’s definitely not the way I’d want to play Elden Ring, but the commitment to the bit is impressive. Of course, MissMikkaa is well known for exploring the Lands Between in the weirdest and most difficult ways possible: Before this, she beat two instances of Elden Ring’s final boss simultaneously, using a dance pad for one and a regular controller for the other.
Ultimate Challenge Run – COMPLETED! I finished the dance pad & controller simultaneous run the other day after beating Elden Beast! It was so much fun and I definitely want to do more creative challenge runs in the future! Thank you all ❤️ pic.twitter.com/YD3GJTmrIcJanuary 8, 2023