| ★ HARDWARE ★ AUDIO - INTERFACE MIDITRACK PERFORMER ★ |
The EMR Miditrack/EMR MIDI Track Performer: Making sweet music with Midi (Amstrad Computer User) | EMR MIDI Track Performer (CPC Amstrad International) | MIDI Track Performer (Happy Computer) | MIDI Track Performer: Wired for sound (Amstrad Action) |
Computer musician MARK JENKINS investigates the musical possibilities of Arnold, and introduces this seven-page Music Special.... Ardent game players will already have some idea of the musical possibilities of Arnold. Games such as Monty on the Run, Knight Games, Ghosts'n'Goblins and many others make good use of Arnold's sound chips and indicate that, with the right software, Arnold could be a musician in his own right. Later ori we will look at how the Midi system allows you to control professional synthesisers with your micro, but don't forget that Arnold's sound chip is a small synthesiser in its own right, and many of the music-oriented packages available need nothing more than software and an ear for a tune to let you make music. Back in July Andy Wilton looked at two products, Minstrel from Kuna Computers (£14.95 cassette, £19.95 disk) and Music Box from The Electric Studio (£9.95 cassette, £16.95 disk). His conclusion was that Music Box was well laid out but 'looks puny and overpriced compared to Rainbird's Music System'. Later in this Music Special Andy looks at the £29.95 disk-only Advanced Music System, which can be upgraded from the basic Music System for £14 (from cassette) or £10 (from disk). Much more basic is Music Master from Vanguard Leisure, licensed from Datasync. Vanguard are the people who launched the Maestro: a hardware package offering a small stereo amplifier, headphones, two 3-inch speakers and a music demo cassette which takes full advantage of the Amstrad's stereo sound output. Both packages are covered in depth later. Another package which will provide endless hours of fun is Amdrum, available through Boots and manufactured by Cheetah Marketing. Amdrum is the only one of these packages to go beyond the comparatively limited potential of the Amstrad's own sound chips. Again, see the full review in the next few pages.
Why have microcomputers become so popular among professional musicians? Simply because in the last few years musical instruments have become more and more like computers anyway - so using a micro such as an Amstrad is no longer an intimidating prospect for musicians as diverse as The Human League, Blancmange. Marillion and Dire Straits. It was inevitable that professional synthesisers eventually would be linked up to micros. We're talking about the latest stage of the synthesiser revolution, which started around 1968 when Robert Moog developed the voltage-controlled oscillator, and which took a massive leap in the late 1970s with the addition of microprocessor control. The early synthesisers - played by pioneers such as Walter Carlos and Keith Emerson - had two main problems: only one note could be played at a time, and each new sound involved setting scores of knobs in positions which could not easily be reproduced. Later microprocessor-controlled synths such as the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 and the Roland Jupiter 8 were fully polyphonic (capable of remembering large numbers of sounds defined by the user), so only a few problems remained. Even in the '70s, synthesisers from different manufacturers were still incompatible with each other. So if you wanted to experiment a little - controlling many instruments from remote keyboards, note recorders (otherwise known as 'sequencers') or other instruments - you were out of luck. But when Dave Scott of Sequential Circuits experienced problems in getting his Polysequencer design to control the Prophet 5 synth, he came up with a proposal for a Universal Synthesiser Interface (USI). Taking the USI proposals to Japanese manufacturers such as Roland and Yamaha resulted in a much expanded format known as MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which is now almost universally used on home computer interfaces, synthesisers, drum machines, sequencers and even guitars. Midi is a binary language similar to RS232 and other computer standards. It uses a serial interface which manifests itself as a five-pin DIN plug of which three pins are used for earth, live and return loop. Midi In or Out sockets (or both) will be found on all instruments, and a Midi Through socket (simply passing on the input signal) is an option. Although some micros now have built-in Midi, most need a small interface to convert their cartridge or user-port transmissions to the Midi hardware standard. The 128 note values available through Midi are made to correspond to a range of ten and a half octaves on a piano keyboard, which is more than enough for conventional composition. You can also send vibrato, wow, pitch-bend and other modulation levels through Midi. Codes are transmitted at regular intervals to synchronise drum machines, sequencers and other units which play notes at a set tempo, so your micro can easily lock on to drum sounds or to other music computers. WHAT MIDI CAN DO The most obvious thing Midi can do is store and replay notes entered from a synthesiser. This makes it possible to compose very lengthy pieces and play them back on several instruments simultaneously using suitable compositional software, such as EMR's Miditrack Performer, reviewed later. With many keyboards now capable of 'sampling' or recording real sounds as well as synthesising new ones, the days of the conventional studio using multi-track tape machines could be numbered. Micros can also store sounds defined on synths but transferred via Midi to the micro's disk drive. And they can help to create new sounds by giving a colourful graphic display of all a synth's functions. Some software packages, such as DX-Droid for the Yamaha DX7 synth (not available on Arnold, I'm afraid!), will even create new sounds for you at random! Back at a more reasonable level, experimenting with Midi requires an Arnold, a Midi interface and suitable software and of course a Midi-standard music keyboard. One of the best to start off with is Casio's CZ-101, which for around £240 offers eight-note chords or four different single notes played simultaneously. It comes with miniature keys but is an ideal beginners'instrument. Nowadays you can pay around £800 for a Midi sequencer such as Roland's MC500, but a micro such as the Amstrad can perform all the same functions with a much more informative display for just the cost of a Midi interface and software. The only difference is... we have yet to see an Amstrad being used on stage! If you wish to use the Midi system on your CPC machine, EMR's Midi track Performer is really the only option at the moment. This is a software package that comes with a Midi interface which lets you control synths such as the Casio CZ-101. The Casio is a very powerful compositional tool, and Peformer takes full advantage of all the expression available via the Midi interface. The one package contains both cassette and disk-based versions, so running on any CPC model. It also comes with the interface itself, which plugs into Arnold's expansion port. This box contains the Midi sockets, and can also control the cheaper Korg or Roland non-Midi drum machines, which you can pick up second-hand for around £130. You will be able to use Performer only to synchronise these, but they could function as a cheap second instrument to your main Midi keyboard. There's only one main display from which the whole package is controlled. This screen is fairly packed, but having it all there in front of you would certainly help in a live performance. On the right of the screen are the Save, Load, Delete, Filename, Clear, Text, Arrange and Time Correct functions. The last of these refers to Performer's ability to clean up a sloppy performance on the synth keyboard to a variable degree. In the centre of the display are Metronome, Count-In (so you know when recording is about to start), Clock, Tempo, Number of Plays. Time Signature and Start Bar (so you can begin recording at any bar of a composition). Record, Play and other important functions are selected using a command window at the bottom of the screen, and you can adjust the tempo using the cursor keys or a joystick. The functions are first selected with the cursor keys, activated with the spacebar and then altered in value using the cursor keys again. This slows you up a little - it would have been nice to have used the keyboard to enter Tempo value, for example. Some of the icons are a little obscure too: a little man on a podium standing for Tempo, a picture of a metronome for Clock. A little confusing, but on the whole Performer is pretty easy to use. On the left of the display are the compositional functions to select which of the eight available tracks you're dealing with; to play or mute each track; to assign a Midi channel; to loop tracks or allow them to play just once; to filter out velocity recording (which can waste a lot of memory): to transpose the pitch of a track; and to arrange a chain of up to 64 patterns for compositions around 20 minutes long. Total capacity of the package is around 8,000 notes, though the actual capacity depends on the amount of information you require with each note. It will deal with eight or more polyphonic synthesisers and drum machines. Performer is limited to eight tracks in theory, instead of the full 16 channels catered for by the Midi standard. This is presumably because of the limitations imposed by the speed of the Amstrad's processor and memory, but the package does allow you to merge two or more tracks into one, so your composition can contain up to 29 separate tracks, though you would not be able to edit all of them separately. A more serious problem was that the review package would hang up if you tried to load a file that didn't exist. This could be frustrating if, for example, you had created a file called SONG1, and tried to call up SONG 1 by mistake. It simply means that you have to be careful when calling up files! But will it ever replace a real recording studio? That depends on whether you're willing to buy a mixer and effects units to deal with all the synthesisers, and whether you're prepared to go without vocals, guitar and other conventional instruments. The best solution is probably to buy a cheap four-track cassette machine and use one track for a click to synchronise Performer, three for vocals, guitars etc, and have all the drums and synths running 'live' onto your master tape. AA#12
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