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The Musical Micro

The Micro Guitar

Article from International Musician & Recording World, September 1986

Tony Mills uncovers some software for—guitarists! Whatever will they think or next?


Just to show that micros aren't just intended for keyboard wizards, let's take a look at a couple of inexpensive packages which will be of interest to the struggling guitar player. Micro Music's Guitar Studio packages for the Commodore 64 (still the best all-round budget music computer) are accompanied by large, well-presented text books which use conventional musical notation to illustrate each 'guitar lesson'.

Guitar Studio One (the software is on either disk or tape) starts with tuning bleeps to tune your own guitar to the computer (since the micro has a conspicuous lack of machine heads) and the pitch of each open string is generated in turn. Each musical example from the book is then displayed or played as appropriate, and different sounds are provided so the lessons aren't too dull. Examples can be played at any speed.

Chord naming, timing and string fingering are all covered and an auto metronome from the computer helps you to play along on the more difficult examples. It's possible to use the examples in any order; a fingerboard display shows which fingers to use on each chord, and on Guitar Studio Two the same idea is applied to a chord dictionary with around 500 chords, a programming facility to create new chords and chord patterns and a practise option which asks you to play along with a selection of backings.

Guitar Studio Three is more theoretical but does display all its chords, triads and intervals both as notes on a music stave and as symbols on a guitar fretboard. The test section is good, so the packages can add up to an excellent home tutor for the beginner, if not a complete substitute for a few sessions with a real live teacher.

Developed by Ian Taylor who teaches guitar at York University, and David Ashworth, of the York Guitar Centre, the packages sell at £9.95 each.

There's more for the guitarist in the Colleen Music Compendium, which combines a Music Theory Tutor, Guitar Tutor, SID (sound chip), Playalong Section, Drum Machine and Sound Creator for only £29.95 on tape or disk for the C64.

The Music Theory section opens with screen illustrations of the stave, treble and bass clefs, notes on the stave, ledger lines, bar lines and repeats, and goes on to note values, rest values, time signatures, ties, pickup notes and accidentals. The computer bleeps out musical examples where appropriate so it's easy to pick up some musical basics if your theory is weak. Enough, at least, to get you on to the Guitar Tutor, which is a numbered fretboard display which allows you to select any major, minor, seventh or minor seventh chord on a grid, and see which fingers to use and where to play the chord on the guitar. Again, your guitar can be tuned to the micro before starting.

Next up is a programming tutor for the C64's built-in SID sound chip, which demands a language of its own to extract even the smallest bleep.

Most of the necessary POKE commands to squeeze sounds from the chip are covered, but the Random and Envelope settings are omitted and there's no detail on musical tuning (you can get this from the C64 User's Manual though). In fact, later sections of the software are more useful in providing either music or sound effects, so you're not likely to need to go very far into this hard-slog programming.

The Playalong section, for instance, is much more immediate — it produces Boogie, Country, Disco or Waltz backings in any key, controllable from a Music Maker clip-on keyboard if you have one, at a choice of three tempos. It's ideal for turning your 64 into a mini-sequencer for improvising over.

The Compendiums Drum Machine Page

The Drum Machine section is also good value, allowing you to enter two to 10-beat patterns of up to three voices and chain them into Songs. 40 bars can be created and edited and there's a good selection of swishy percussion noises — within the limitations of the SID chip, of course. Patterns can be loaded from and saved to disk and any bar may be used as many times as you like in a pattern, and can be copied or moved within the pattern. Complete instructions onscreen make a handbook almost unnecessary.

The last part of the Compendium, the Sound Creator, has three distinct sections; the Creator, Combiner and Effects Master. The Creator includes a keyboard display, icon-style options for Play, Disk Loading and other functions, Tempo and other controls, and in the Compose mode allows you to enter notes and timings using a joystick for each of the three voices individually. You can copy sections or delete them, and create your own sounds with waveshape, vibrato, sweep and filtering characteristics on another display. Any combination of voices up to 2100 notes can be played back, and you can save a piece for further work or as a machine code file which can be used as part of your own games or other programs. By a miracle of computer technology the music can be played at the same time as a screen display (using System Interrupts, which you don't have to worry about as the system inserts them for you) and the demo piece (I Hear You Now by Jon and Vangelis) gives some idea of the wide range of possibilities afforded by The Creator.

The Combiner is another machine code based routine intended to call up any two or three of your tunes from memory instantaneously — it's only available on the disk version, and the screen display contains all the information necessary to create a Combiner file. Again, this can be used to provide music for your own games programs.

The Effects Master allows you to create sound effects for much the same applications; six parameters have to be entered in the form:

SYS52700,A,B,C,D,E,F,

Where A is Start Frequency, B is Step Amount, C is Effect Direction (stationary, up, down or oscillate), D is Time, E is Waveform and F is Repetition.

Telephone, Alarm, Helicopter, Phaser and Machine Gun sounds are among the examples given, and effects and music programs can be run simultaneously, although the musical sound from Voice 3 will be temporarily pinched for the effects. So the Colleen package has a wide variety of teaching and playing applications, and remember that the individual units are also available separately. At the package price, though, it's worth having the whole Compendium.

Good news for FM synthesis fans who haven't been able to afford a Yamaha CX5M or who have been put off by its MIDI limitations. The Yamaha X-Series Owners' Club have now published a specsheet telling you how to interface the new MIDI-updated FM tone module, the SFG-05 to any MSX micro. Two-slot micros such as the Sony Hit Bit and Canon are ideal, and these can be picked up very cheaply at the moment.

All you need to do is etch out the appropriate connecting links on a piece of circuit board which will join the tone module to the micro's cartridge port. All the materials to do this can be bought for less than £5 (Yamaha's sheet gives order codes for Maplin Electronics mail order supplies) and once this is done you can use the SFG-05 (or the older SFG-01 if you have another spare micro) with Music Macro (a compositional language), MIDI Recorder, FM Music Composer, the RX11 and DX21 Editors and even the independent DMS Real-Time Composer package.

Other micro packages to look out for include the Hybrid Arts products newly imported by Syndromic Music. Much of this software is based on the very inexpensive Atari 130XE which is around £269 with disk drive.

With MIDITrackII and a MIDI interface the computer and disk drive sell for around £475, and the package [offers] Real Time and Step Time composing with advanced editing functions, 10,500 note capacity, simultaneous playing on all 16 MIDI channels and a straightforward single screen display.

You can punch in and punch out to correct mistakes, loop and chain sections without using additional memory, set delays between different channels to compensate for MIDI problems, auto-correct your playing and much more. The package syncs to MIDI, to tape, or even to video using a SMPTE code reader. It'll also read one-pulse-per-beat clocks, so even the oldest drum machines and sequencers can be linked up.

Also for the 130XE there's a DX7 Editor/library package, DX7 and Casio CZ patch libraries, librarian packages for the Oberheim OB8, Prophet 5 and Drumtraks drum machine, and an editor for the Ensoniq Mirage sampler.

On the larger Atari 520ST and 1040ST computers there's a more powerful version of the sequencer program, the Oasis Mirage editor (with a version for the Akai S900 sampler on the way), and the DX-Droid, which uses artificial intelligence principles to invent new sounds for the Yamaha DX7.

Syndromic will shortly have a new showroom in North London where they'll be demonstrating Atari and Commodore packages including the MIDI-compatible Tron Digidrum III, Joreth and Steinberg music software, and keyboards from Akai, Yamaha and Roland.

Next time — all the latest packages from Steinberg. You have been warned!

Syndromic Music: (Contact Details)
Micro Music, (Contact Details)
Colleen Ltd, (Contact Details)
Martin Tennant/Yamaha X-Series Owners' Club, (Contact Details)


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Publisher: International Musician & Recording World - Cover Publications Ltd, Northern & Shell Ltd.

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International Musician - Sep 1986

Topic:

Computing


Previous article in this issue:

> Playing With Fur

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> PA Column


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