mxdx .?i)iiy$1$jp - Bombjack.org

STRIKE UP THE BAND—
attiiga TJJusic: Tfje State Of Tbe art
Making music on a traditional instrument
requires a major investment to develop one's
chops or manual dexterity. You can do that on
an electronic instrument, too, if you insist, but
the real advantage of a newfangled musicmaker
is that you don't have to practice
forever to get musical satisfaction.
Making music on the Amiga is especially easy
because it's a powerful computer coupled with
a flexible, high-quality musical instrument.
Thanks to computer memory and software,
making music is a two-step process, with time
on your side for a change. For most of it,
you'll work one step away from the final
outcome, entering notes at your leisure with
the mouse or slowly playing them into memory
on an attached piano-type keyboard. This is
possible because unlike acoustic sound,
electronic sound is produced in two distinct
parts, pitch being one, and timbre or the
nature of the sound being the other, so that
changing one doesn't alter its counterpart.
Electronic music can be played faster without
altering the pitch, and parts that were entered
separately can be played back together without
any loss of quality. Once you've entered the
notes, the instruments playing various parts
can be swapped until you're satisfied with the
arrangement.
NOTE EDITORS & SEQUENCERS
Although standard music notation isn't
capable of reflecting much that electronic
music-makers can do, it is used in computer
music programs because nobody has come up
with an acceptable alternative. These programs
are commonly, but not always, called note
editors. This capability means that after
you've entered the music, the program provides
a means of altering pitch and duration, and
moving or copying notes alone or in groups,
and a good note editor can save you a lot of
work. All of the programs described here have
note> editors, though one of them, ProMIDI
Studio, uses numbers instead of standard music
notation. Note editors also incorporate some
of the functions from what was the original
software music manipulator, the sequencer.
f 56 '
—*i - —^
1IIHII1IIIIIII1I i
by Hcrrit^ton
t
A sequencer lets you do much more than
copy or paste and add first and second endings,
which are the features most commonly
borrowed by note editors. It saves groups of
notes in separate sections and lets you set them
up to play in unlimited combinations, AABA
or ABABC, for example. A sequencer doesn't
use much computer memory because rather
than actually rewriting sections in the proper
order, internal pointers are used to indicate
which part gets played when. Complex scoring
can be arranged with a sequencer, as musicians
familiar with the fugue will appreciate
immediately. I don't know how true it is, but
a college professor of mine claimed that J.S.
Bach -the master of the fugue- had written
more music than the average person today
could copy by hand, working eight hours a
day, five days a week during his entire
working life. It boggles the mind to think
what he could have done with ProMIDI Studio,
the only program mentioned here that has both
a sequencer and note editor.
IFF COMPATIBILITY
Music software is available on all kinds of
personal computers, but Amiga program
developers are working on something that's a
first in the industry. Graphics and music
developers are trying to put the data produced
by their programs into a standardized format
'so that it can be used with their competitor's
products. It's called the Interchange File
Format (IFF for short) and so far the graphics
artists are ahead of the musicians which is,
interestingly enough, the way it's been down
through the ages. (Digital sampler makers arc
in on the act, too, sec Info #13 for details.) It
should be worth the wait because once the
rough edges and transitions are smoothed out
(and actually, there aren't that many left),
Amiga musicians will be able to enter a
composition with the program of their choice,
edit and arrange it with another they think
better suited, print out sheet music with a
third, and synchronize video images to it with
a fourth.
Here are the programs which promise that
power.
J