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).
The Music Machine from Ram Electronics and Flare Technology (a bunch of ex-Sinclairites) follows this trend.
The Music Machine contains in its slim black plastic an initially amazing selection of silicon bits to push out the noises.
As well as the drum machine (much like the aforementioned Amdrum), there's a sampler, lotsa Midi magic and an amplifier. Let's take them in order. 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.
The sounds provided are rather good as well, which doesn't hurt in a drum machine. The editing of the patterns is much simpler than with Amdrum; more on this and the rest of the software later. 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.
All you need do is point a mike (supplied) at something noisy and press a button, and you've got it taped - well, rammed. 
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.
It's on a par with a good transistor radio, and the better your amplifier or headphones the better it performs. 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.
Most percussive noises take less than 0.1 of a second, so even a full drum kit will most likely leave memory to spare. If you feel the urge to sample voices and longer sounds, then you're going to have to be a little more inventive. 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.
If they're not, then when the sound repeats there can be a sudden change in the output, sounding like an old-fashioned vinyl record type click.
Got eight samples yet? Good. Now there are various ways to use those carefully captured cadences. The easiest and most immediate is from the keyboard. 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.
Then there are the compositional tools. If you want to be musical you can write bars of music on a full-screen stave editor. You can only use one voice, but this can be played at two pitches at once. 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.
The final way to release those sounds on an unsuspecting world is through the Midi ports. MIDI - Musical Instrument Digital Interface - is to synthesisers and drum machines what RS232 is to modems and computers: It links them all together. And, amazingly enough, it really is a standard. Everything is fixed; speed, connector-types, data types, the lot.
You can take a Japanese synth made years ago and the latest American , drum machine - and if they've both got Midi, they'll talk to each other with no fiddling. 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.
You can also take a tune or drum rhythm you knocked up in the Machine and squirt it out to a drumbox or Fairlight. But then the Fairlight's a little redundant with a Music Machine and a CZ-101.
Well connected
You can also talk to another Music Machine. I had the Spectrum version for a few months before I got the
Straddy (no, not the violin), and I hooked the two together: It worked wonderfully.
The software is structured so that although you can't play both drums and music on one Machine at once, you can send the drum info down the Midi and play the music, or vice versa.
You can also play the Amstrad's built-in sound chip from the external synthesiser, but this seems a mite peculiar. Like getting Eric Clapton in your band and making him play the triangle. 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
the microphone comes out of the amplifier that length of time later.
With a little feedback, some nice reverberation and fun effects can be generated, including some indescribable noises that are immediately recognisable from some of the wierder records one hears. So now you know how they do it, and can do it yourself should you feel the urge.
That's the features, now for the functionality. Harking back to the Amdrum yet again, the software was its Achilles'heel.
The Music Machine is much better behaved. Everything is a single key press from the Main Menu and all the options are well labelled.
The few minor eccentricities are mostly forgivable - the only cardinal sin is the omission of an "Are you sure?" mugtrap on the Delete menu. One press, and away goes a few hours of heartfelt hiphop.
Memory management is good and there's usually an on-screen indicator of how much time you've got to fill. There are options to switch between tape and disc, and catalog functions, though no through connector for DDI-1 owners.
The different menu screens fade in and out in a slow, stylish manner which also happens to be indescribably frustrating if you want to do it quickly. 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.
I should mention that I had the Spectrum manual with a little note detailing differences and promising the Amstrad version "in the near future". But the software is so similar that nobody should have problems in the meantime.
It might seem strange, but your family, friends and neighbours will probably have little enthusiasm for your latest renderings, especially in the early hours. 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.
People will probably want to knock up their own software. In a way, the Music Machine's just too good. The software supplied tries to show off every aspect of the Machine, but in the process leaves a lot of potential unrealised - after a few hours playing around, it'-s easy to spot places for improvement.
For example, it would be useful to have a sequencer for Midi, so you can play a tune in on the external synth, record it, edit it and play it back. It would be even better (and fairly easy) to have a full synthesiser function for making your own noises from scratch, or editing samples in complex ways.
And special versions of the software to make good use of the extra 64k of RAM 6128 owners have would be nifty too. 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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