| ★ HARDWARE ★ AUDIO - MUSIC MACHINE ★ |
| MUSIC MACHINE (c) RAY (CPCINFOS) | MUSIC MACHINE (Amstrad Computer User) | MUSIC MACHINE (Amstrad Action) | MUSIC MACHINE (Amstrad Sinclair Ocio) | Töne für den CPC: Music Machine (CPC Magazin) |
Rupert Goodwins plays with a new peripheral which sounds better than most Microcomputers and music have always been close friends, ever since a ZX80 games cassette was played on a walkman by mistake, giving Gary Numan a nasty surprise which he later passed on to the rest of us. Admittedly, musical add-ons for the CPCs have been a little thin on the ground. They've usually been pass-me-downs from the Spectrum, possibly the best example to date being the Specdrum/Amdrum (reviewed in ACU, October 1986). Beating the drum The drum machine bears comparison with Amdrum all down the line. Eight separate noises can be played back according to a pattern you type in, to make up a simple rhythm or complete song. Unlike Cheetah, Ram doesn't market extra tapes containing exotic percussion. This isn't an oversight; they're just not needed. For where the Music Machine really starts to make waves is in the input deépartment. It has, in the parlance, got a sampler built in, which takes an electrical signal from a radio, tape, record or microphone. This it converts into computer data, which can be stashed away like any other data.
This sample can then be edited to just the right length, reversed at will and used as another drum sound or even as a musical voice. It's currently very much in vogue in the music industry to use sampled sounds in preference to the real thing; there are places in London where one cannot move for cadaverous youths waiting for someone to die noisily into their tape recorders, just to feed a bit of atmosphere into their synths. Free samples The process of sampling is as simple as recording something on cassette. The only thing that can go wrong is the level; if it's too low the sound will be too quiet on playback, and if it's too high everything ends up distorted. Sensibly, there's a twiddly thing atop the Music Machine, known in the music trade as a knob, which can adjust the level in conjunction with the onscreen volume meter. You can start the sample when the input reaches a certain level, or when you press a button on the keyboard. There's a limit to how much you can store in your computer. Exactly what the capacity is depends on the quality of recording, and how much else in the way of drum sequences and tunes resides in the guts of the machine. The quality is fixed by various elements of the design of the Music Machine and is amply good enough. You can tell the difference between a sampled sound and the real thing, but the response isn't anything to complain about. But back to the capacity. Generally, it's around 1.2 seconds. Now that might not seem a lot, especially when there can be up eight separate samples residing in RAM at once, but it's very useful. And, as you can make sounds repeat, there's plenty of scope to out-sample PPPPaul Hardcastle. Sound and vision There are some editing facilities for samples. You can display a sound as a graph of volume against time and move a pair of pointers over it to select any portion. You can zoom in for a close look at any part of the sample, and this helps to select start and end points that are at exactly the same level. In Piano mode, you chose one sample and play it at various pitches as you would play a piano. In Drum mode, eight keys map on to the samples and you can pat them with your pinkies as you would a miniature drum kit. Having knocked up a bar or two you can then make a tune by linking them together. Likewise, drum sounds can be put together in bars and thence into tunes, but you can have up to three drum sounds playing at once. The traditional things like tempo can be varied in the usual way. And, amazingly enough, it really is a standard. Everything is fixed; speed, connector-types, data types, the lot. Midi is getting very big in the music world, and Music Machine's got Midi. As a result, you can take a synthesiser (like the very wonderful Casio CZ-101) and use it to play the samples in the Machine. Another little extra which seems slightly out of place, but fun nevertheless, is the Echo. You type in a delay in milliseconds and anything you say in Musical notation The handbook is so much better than the opposition it's almost unfair to make a comparison. Lightly written with a definite streak of humour, it manages to get everything in and indexed without being terse or verbose. And anything which starts with a chapter called "Can't wait to try it, huh?" can't be entirely bad. There's ample technical information concerning I/O ports, filters and MIDI; anyone with a technical bent should be able to produce their own software to do anything they want to. Flare's inclusion of a headphone amplifier is therefore to be loudly applauded - or, if it's in the early hours, given a quiet nod of approval. As long as you can supply walkman-style cans, you're able plug in and go. And you shouldn't have any problems with reliability; a quick peek inside the box proved reassuring. The link between the level control and the knob seemed a little flimsy at first, but an unnecessarily nasty waggle was withstood admirably. Fun filled But even without those goodies (which Flare hints might be on the way), the Music Machine is a worthwhile hunk of technology. Sampling is fun, drum machines are fun, Midi is fun. And all in one package for £50 - the price of four or five good games? Fun fun fun! ACU #8703 |
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