Not content with producing one of the best sequencing packages around, German company Steinberg Research have developed a scorewriting program to go with it. Does it maintain the standard?

For some reason, music software houses have been falling over themselves to produce scorewriting programs for the Commodore 64. I don't quite know why this is, because the poor C64 is rather slow and (in contemporary terms) definitely short on memory. But this hasn't stopped Joreth, JMS and Passport Designs from incorporating music printing programs into their Commodore software. Now, against the backdrop of a fairly competitive market, Steinberg Research have unveiled their scorewriting model.

It's called TNS (for The Note System), and it has to be loaded from within the company's Pro 16 sequencer, with at least one track of the sequencer already recorded. The combined loading time of these programs is getting on for three minutes, but you'll be pleased to know Steinberg will soon be bringing out the two programs in EPROM format à la the JMS Scorewriter, which should speed things up no end.

Once both programs are loaded you can switch between the two in a mere couple of seconds, which means you can finish recording a sequence and see the first few bars up on screen in an instant.

What you can't do is listen to your music and watch it scrolling by at the same time: in fact, the music display doesn't scroll at all. From the Configuration page of TNS you can define the bar from which you want the display to start, though what's a pity is that the music playback won't follow suit when you go back into the sequencer.

A further (inevitable) setback to having TNS in memory is that you lose space for storing your musical meanderings — over a third of it, to be exact. If you want to commit your piece of music to the printed page, better make sure it isn't a Genesis-like 25-minute epic.

The advantages of having TNS resident in memory together with the sequencer are many, because TNS does more than just print out your music. Lurking behind that innocent exterior is a comprehensive score-based step-time editor, which allows you to delete notes, add them, and alter the pitch and duration of existing notes; these alterations don't just affect the score, but the actual data held in memory.

With a wide range of note durations (as with the sequencer, down to 64th notes and taking in triplets along the way) and the ability to insert or delete any note that can be fitted within the range of the staves and leger lines, you can do quite a lot to mess up your perfectly executed recordings.

For those wondering if you can actually compose music from scratch onto the score display and then hear it played in the sequencer program, the answer is you can — though this seems almost incidental to the TNS design.

TNS has two displays: the first is a colourful configuration page where you set up parameters and assign tracks to staves, while the second is the actual music display and editing page. Three staves can be displayed on screen at any given time, though you can define a total of 24 staves via the configuration page. As Pro 16 gives you a maximum of 16 tracks, the extra number of staves allows you some leeway if you're using combined staves (treble and bass clefs on a piano score, say).

Only the top three staves in the configuration page's list can be displayed, but you can rotate through the total number of staves one at a time, so that any adjacent trio of staves can be brought into those top three positions.

You can scroll through the display in either direction by the bar or crotchet/quaver, and a maximum of four bars per stave can be displayed on a single screen with note values of a crotchet or longer. The spacing expands to accommodate shorter note values, so the display is always uncluttered and easy to read.

Both display and printout are commendably clear, with just a couple of points that I reckon need sorting out: notes a semitone or tone apart in a chord should appear on opposite sides of the stem, and accidentals which aren't part of the key signature should only apply for the bar they're in.

The global parameters on the configuration page allow you to choose which bar the music display should begin from, the time signature of the music (though I couldn't get this to go beyond 4/4 with a sequence recorded in 7/4; a bug, perhaps?), whether pairs of staves are linked visually, and whether stave lines are dotted or continuous.

TNS can only ever print out your currently selected sequence, and you have to go back to Pro 16 to call up a new sequence. And while you can obviously select a new time signature for each piece, it's a shame you can't mix different time signatures in different tracks.

Features specific to a particular stave consist of key signature, quantisation value, release, legato and staccato values, and selection of a range and register for the stave. Incidentally, TNS only gives you treble and bass clefs, so such niceties as alto, tenor and soprano clefs are out. Anyone scoring string arrangements will miss the first, while early music aficionados will be even further out in the cold.

Being able to select a different key signature for each stave is valuable, as it allows you to print out parts for transposing instruments. However, this isn't a transpose facility in itself; you have to do that within the Pro 16 sequencer.

Steinberg have been very thorough in providing all possible major and minor key signatures, including sharp and flat equivalents where applicable. Where chromatic notes require a sharp or flat indication, the nature of this depends on whether the chosen key signature is sharp or flat, while alternative sharp and flat versions of C major and A minor have been included (useful for correctly notating modulations in one direction or the other).

The release, legato and staccato features allow you to tidy up the rhythmic details of your score. Both release and staccato extend the duration of a note, with staccato working on very short note values. Legato, on the other hand, allows you to get rid of any slight overlapping of notes.

Finally, you can choose a range and a register (within limits) for each stave by setting upper and lower split-points. In fact, you have to do this (with some care) if you're to see your music without lots of diagonal lines through the staves indicating 'out of range'. The manual explains this all-important but really quite confusing area with woeful inadequacy, and a lot of people might just give up. Shame that such a silly demand should be made on the user when the rest of the software is generally friendly and easy to work with.

More encouraging are TNS' editing facilities. A thick vertical blue bar appears with a transparent cursor 'box' positioned within it: you can then move this anywhere you like around the display. Once you've positioned the cursor (and you have to be fairly accurate), you can insert or delete a note, raise or lower an existing note a semitone at a time (shame you can't 'drag' a note up or down), give a note a new duration or add a duration to an existing note (which is how you create dotted and double-dotted notes). An irritating bleep from the 64's SID chip whenever you make an error ensures you quickly learn what not to do.

Problems? Well, if you're starting from scratch as opposed to editing existing data, you can't choose the range you want to work in. It would also be useful if there was some guide to leger lines, and if you should accidentally place one note on top of another, there's no way of deleting or moving them short of returning to the sequencer and punching them out.

The program has a very annoying habit of redrawing the screen each time you make a change to the score, regardless of whether or not that change requires a large-scale adjustment. This takes at least three or four seconds and can slow you down a fair bit if you've a lot of adjustments to make.

TNS doesn't allow you to add anything to the music display, such as tempo markings, performance indications or lyrics: you have to add them yourself (by hand, horror of horrors) once the score is printed out.

Whatever you do, don't expect this software to print out your magnum opus in a couple of minutes — or even ten minutes. It actually takes 14 minutes to print out three screen's worth of score; I'll leave you to work out how that accords with your own music.

To be fair, this sort of time scale applies to any scorewriting program written for the Commodore 64, and is related to printer speed (or lack of it). And you do get a good-looking score at the end of it all.

The combination of Pro 16 and TNS provides a powerful package which must rank as one of the best (perhaps even the best) yet written for an eight-bit home computer. It's fair to say the scorewriting and printing facilities won't find the degree of professional use that the sequencer undoubtedly will. MIDI music printing will only truly come of age when systems are developed to run on 16-bit computers.

But TNS also gives you some extensive step-time editing facilities, and allows you to create music, using a score-based system, which can then be played within the Pro 16 sequencer — and there's no denying the value in that.

There are a few points — major and minor — that need clearing up, and a few additions which could usefully be made. But frankly, I'm amazed Steinberg have managed to cram so much into the C64, and still left musicians with a reasonable amount of memory left for their music.

If you're already sold on the Steinberg Sequencer, start saving your pennies for the Scorewriter. It's worth it.

Prices Pro 16 Sequencer £90, TNS Scorewriter £120, Interface £135, MIDI and Sync card interfaces £40 each — all including VAT

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