When I looked at Band-in-a-Box in the July 1991 issue of SOS, I mentioned that a similar but more sophisticated (Atari ST only) MIDI accompanist program called Freestyle was also available from Zone Distribution. Freestyle adds a more graphical interface, and offers a 'real-time' accompaniment mode as well as producing and arranging backing tracks for songs.

Freestyle comes in a very impressive A4-size zip-up folder containing pencil, notepad, manual, overview, UK User Guide, a style information book and two disks: the Freestyle program (copy-protected) plus a Style disk. In the review copy there was also a 1.14 update disk and update information. The main manual has to be read in combination with the UK User Guide, which clarifies things and helps you to find your way through the rather confused organisation (and English) of the main manual.

Freestyle works with a free memory of 100K, which makes it easy to use with a sequencer via a memory switcher, and the program is compatible with Steinberg's M.ROS and C-Lab's Soft-Link. It operates in two modes: Leadsheet and MIDI. Leadsheet mode is the song creation mode, in which you define styles and other parameters for all the bars in a song, whereas MIDI mode is intended more for real-time doodling. In Leadsheet mode up to 10 songs can be held in memory at once. Each song can use up to eight styles, freely assigned to bars, and there are five independent instrument tracks: Drums, Bass and three Accompaniments.

A song is made up of 'pages', where each page corresponds to a separate phrase or section of the song. Each page can contain up to 40 bars, or 'entries', as they are called by Freestyle. Entries can be any of six types, called parts: Original; Variation; Fill to Original; Fill to Variation; Intro; Ending. An entry appears on the screen as a square of parameter values followed by a bar-line. The chord root is in the centre, surrounded clockwise by: the part (ORG, VAR, FTO, FTV, INT, END) and the style which will be used in that bar; the chord type (major and minor, major and minor seventh, diminished and augmented... 13 types in all); and the 'muting', which is actually the instrument choice (drums, bass, or the three accompaniments). You can therefore mute any of the instruments on a per-bar basis. Entries can also be split into two half bars, so you can change chords halfway through a bar, but the style and part are the same for both halves.

Editing of parameters can be performed almost entirely with the mouse: for all except the muting, you left-click to increase or scroll one way and right-click to decrease or scroll in the opposite direction. Instruments can be controlled — mute, volume, program change number, velocity (dynamics scaling) and octave transposition — from the MIDI mixer box, whilst the 'Human Touch' function provides random variations of volume for user-selected drum sounds. Above the MIDI mixer box is the style box, where clicking on a name loads a new style from disk, and clicking on the style number changes to that style throughout the page.

After all this mousing, the way that entries are manipulated is a surprise: you use the left/right cursor keys to move to the position on the page, and then use the ST's QWERTY keyboard to add a new entry by pressing the 'A' key. You then need to use the mouse to change the chord name from C, the default, set the chord type and the part etc. The up/down cursor keys are used to move between pages. Single letters on the QWERTY keyboard are used for most of the management of pages. An arrange list dialogue box allows you to name the pages and make the song structure clearer. The numeric keypad has the start, stop and continue controls, and once you've created a song you can either hear it in real time over MIDI (Band-in-a-Box needs to stop and calculate), or output it as a format 0 MIDI File.

The styles produce music very much in the named idioms, and are based around the sounds and program number mapping of the Roland MT32 as a default, which serves well as a guide to the type of instrumentation. User-definable mapping files can be created, loaded and saved to disk for other instruments — you need to consider the instrumentation carefully for the best results. Similar drum mapping files allow Yamaha SY77/RX etc., Emu Proteus and Korg M/T series instruments to be used.

You can create new styles with any MIDI File compatible sequencer by using a specific track/channel format, and entering notes in the key of C. The MIDI Files from the sequencer are converted to styles by Freestyle, and the new styles can then be stored on disk. Example MIDI Files are supplied for the 32 styles that come with the program. You thus have complete control over the styles that you use and can customise them to your own needs — Freestyle can therefore provide a 'clone' of your playing style. The very openness of the use of MIDI Files as the input medium is apparent in the unrestricted feel of the styles — you don't get the feeling of having limited choices, as is so often the case with a pre-programmed accompaniment that has to try and provide for all possibilities with only a few fixed variations.

MIDI mode allows a more real-time way of working, with Freestyle playing away live as you control it from your MIDI keyboard. Selecting the MIDI mode opens a large dialogue box that keeps track of what is happening with the accompaniment. MIDI program changes and the function keys are used to control part operations like intros, fills, variations and fade-outs, whilst chords from an external MIDI keyboard are recognised, and set the key of the accompaniment. The same 13 types of chords are recognised as in Leadsheet mode, but this time you aren't limited to only two chords per bar, and the last chord is held until you play a new one.

Only notes below the user-definable split point (which defaults to C3) are used to control the accompaniment, with the upper part of the keyboard being left free for you to play melody lines. The lower part of the dialogue box contains doubling and octave shifts to help the playing of melody lines using the soft MIDI Thru.

Freestyle offers more versatility than Band-in-a-Box, and the user interface is much better. The ability to define your own styles in a memory-switched sequencer and then transfer them via a MIDI File for conversion to a Freestyle style definition provides huge scope for composition purposes. I really liked the MIDI accompaniment mode as a way of trying out chord progressions — playing on just one instrument tends to mean that you concentrate on the rhythm too much, but when this is taken care of by the accompaniment you can concentrate much more on the cadencing and harmonic flow of the song. Both modes really do free you from having to deal with too much of the fine detail early in the song writing process. You can jam in MIDI mode to rough out a few chords, then work on it in Leadsheet mode to get the structure finalised, and you can then use the resulting MIDI File in your sequencer to tweak all the twiddly bits later.

Freestyle has forced me to look hard at all that music theory that I had never thought would come in useful, and I now find that I try much harder to find a chord that sounds absolutely right instead of just passably usable.

The whole topic of accompaniment seems to be the theme of the '90s, from bogus improvisation programs at one American show to complex working composer's toolboxes like Freestyle. Band-in-a-Box's unpredictable weighted randomness seems awkward and restricting compared to Freestyle's repeatable user control, and the extra cost is certainly apparent in the professional feel, mouse-oriented user interface, MIDI control functions, and MIDI accompaniment. Overall, a winner — the combination of user-customisation with a flexible accompaniment program certainly made me re-appraise my whole way of working on songs.

FURTHER INFORMATION

£149 Inc VAT.

Zone Distribution, (Contact Details).