| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ CREATION MUSICAL ★ THE MUSIC SYSTEM ★ |
| The Music System (c) Rainbird (AM-Mag) | THE MUSIC SYSTEM (Amstrad Action) | The Music System (Amstrad Computer User) | The Music System (CPC Amstrad International) |
The musical capabilities of Amstrad are often overlooked but The Music System from Rainbird may put an end to that. Simon Rockman puts it to the test.
The Music System (TMS) is a composing utility which allows you to enter notes from the keyboard and play them back. Ideal for a budding Paul McCartney. The key to the system is simplicity of operation, it is designed to be a word processor for music, full of options, trendy pop-down menus and windows. There is no facility for mouse control, although this may be incorporated in the next Rainbird product - the Art Studio. To get the most from a complicated program you need a comprehensive manual. TMS comes with a 64 page ring bound book which folds flat, making it easy to read as you experiment. The most valuable page is the quick key reference. The manual has been prepared on an Apple Macintosh and typeset using a laser printer which gives it a nice open feel. There are plenty of diagrams and it is easy to follow. Getting started The best way to get to grips with TMS is to dive in and get started. The tape version has a fast loader, but as the program is quite large it takes a little while to load so you get a pretty title screen (with a very nice Rainbird logo) to stare at while you wait. Once the program has loaded you can select the colours used by the system. The whole program runs in mode 2. All the modules are displayed the whole time. As you step around them the one you have selected is highlighted by a shadow behind the relevant menu. The ESCape key moves you back to a previous level from any menu or sub-menu. This can be used as a panic button if you end up in a situation you can't get out of. A metronome controls the speed at which the music plays. The sequencer can be used to override envelopes. One feature which is new to the Amstrad version of TMS is relative volumes for the voices. In earlier versions you had to do some quite complicated filtering to make one voice louder than the rest. Music is best entered by using the keyboard mode. This allows you to use the qwerty keyboard as though it were a piano. This is done in real time, so you really need to be both a pianist and a typist to be efficient. The keyboard speed can be set to a beginners level. Only a crochet at a time, but you still need to know what you are doing. The only way to master the keyboard option is to practice. The Editor Those of us with less agile fingers will have to use the editor. Even the best computer pianist will probably spend as much time editing the score as entering it. The editor gives you access to file handling. Both the tape and disc versions support disc and tape storage. The file handling commands allow you to load, save, delete and catalogue your files. The load command lets you choose files from a menu, none of the usual "what did I call that file?" problems. You can play a tune with or without the bars scrolling by. This is especially useful if you want to spot a bum note, although you can only view one voice at a time. You can elect to listen to individual channels or mix them and play at being Paul Hardcastle. Entering notes is a doddle. You are given a default note in a default position on the stave. The note can be moved up or down on the stave to change the pitch, sharpened or flattened. The length of the note can be selected from a menu. This includes dotted notes. Using TMS is an ideal way to learn musical notation, a sort of learn by doing system. You can set up a note, listen to it and decide if that is what you want. When you add notes the last note (the one you are fiddling with) is not entered until you press return. A pointer along the top of the stave shows whether the note has been entered or is a 'phantom' note. You can toggle between a note and a rest by just pressing the spacebar. There is room for 999 notes per voice. A thermometer-like device shows how much room is left for each voice. This magnifies the amount consumed until the memory is half full. So although the meter initially appears to drop rapidly there really is a lot of room. Bach to the keyboard The Amstrad has a four octave range but the keyboard is only wide enough for typing two octaves at a time. To solve this problem the computer keyboard is used as a 'window' which scrolls up and down the octaves. If you cannot type as fast as you want to play you can enter the music at a slow speed and then speed up the playback. This can be done either using the met ronome (a French elf who lives on the Paris tube) or by selecting the name for a particular speed, given in Italian (this really is educational isn't it?). Editing music can cause the timing to be thrown out of line with the number of beats in the bar. This is set up at the beginning of the session and governs the speed of the whole thing. You can go through checking that the bars are OK automatically. The program will either give you the message "Good news - All OK" or stop at the error so that you can tidy it up. As with a word processor you can cut and paste phrases. There is a scratchpad for you to copy stuff into which can then be written out onto another part of the stave. Tuis makes it very easy to write music which all sounds the same, because it is the same. Perhaps Barry Manilow has got a Music System? How to Handel emphasis The Music System has a very flexible set of envelopes. You can define up to eight and swap them in the middle of the music. This makes even a short phrase cut and pasted a few times with a load of different envelopes sound great. Of course it is just as easy to make it sound dreadful, but then you can't expect artistic appreciation from a computer. You can give an accent to whole bars. This makes a bar louder or softer at the beginning. It allows a sort of envelope within an envelope. Free tunes Each copy of TMS has a set of sample tunes. These have all been written for Rainbird so that there is no copyright problem. It would have been very useful if Rainbird had produced a run-time module so that you could compose your tune and then use that data file to make the tune run from within a game of your own, but that would have required you to use code written by Rainbird which they want to retain the copyright to. It would also mean that you would have to write your program around their routines, something that most professional programmers would object to doing. Finale Rainbird intend to produce software which is a cut above the rest.They are not interested in games which are just a jolly good blast. They insist that there is a lot to each of their tit les. There certainly is a lot to The Music System. A knowledge of music is helpful, but you soon learn how to fly the program. There will be an advanced system, called logically enough The Advanced Music System. This will load in each module from disc (no tape version) and have more room for tunes, a printer module and a linker to allow you to join together several files and make a really long tune. Even if you are only going to fiddle with music it is great fun to take a song-sheet and type in the tune, watching the notes scroll by. If you have any serious use for a music program it is a must. Add it to your Chopin list. ACU #8603 |
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