Tips on Using Ad Lib's VISUAL COMPOSER Copyright 1990 Public (software) Library Compiled by Nelson Ford This file may not be copied for others prior to March 15th, 1990. After that date, it may be freely copied so long as no changes are made to this file. - - - - - - - The following ideas are not the ultimate in VC usage, they are just some things that VC users (including myself) have found to make VC work even better. If you have other tips or ways to improve on the following, please let me know. It is assumed that you have read the manuals that come with VC. Just to get one bit of terminology straight, however: the VC supports nine "Voices" if you choose to compose/transcribe "without percussion", or six "Voices" plus five percussion instruments if you choose "with percussion." A "Voice" is not necessarily an instrument, it is a series of notes. A piano chord could easily take six "Voices" by itself, with each Voice playing one note in the chord. It is possible to transcribe music without any prior music knowledge at all, but it would be extremely slow and difficult, so we are going to assume that you know how to read music. If you don't, you can easily get a book on the subject from the library, so this file will stick to the Ad Lib's tricks. Included on this disk are some music files to which the following notes refer. Note that "AINT-TOO" is not completed. (Can't get it to sound the way I really want it to sound.) Buying Sheet Music: ------------------ I am not a composer, and I doubt that I will ever be. But I do love music, and with Ad Lib's Visual Composer, I have been able to add greatly to my enjoyment and appreciation of my favorite classical and rock music pieces. As a result of my personal bias, this file looks at Visual Composer from the point of view of transcribing, rather than composing, but most of the VC tricks are useful either way. Transcribing music is a lot of fun. Most good-size towns & cities have music stores where sheet music is sold. Getting the sheet music to your favorite numbers and transcribing it into Ad Lib format will give you an even greater appreciation for those favorites. Sheet music usually costs under $2, or you can get a whole book of songs (as many as 100) for under $20, although you have to be careful because most books like that have overly-simplified scores that have very little of the feel of the original music. If you just go into a music store and ask for the sheet music for a particular piece, you will probably get an arrangement that has been "reduced" for playing on a piano. This means that instead of giving you the notes for each instrument, the "melody", harmony, etc, have been "simplified" - converted to a smaller number of notes that can be played on the piano. It is possible to get books that contain full orchestral arrangements of classical music. These are relatively expensive and look very challenging. Furthermore, a glance will show you that these have more notes than will fit in the six to nine non-percussion voices of VC. If you really want to have "fun", get one of these books and take a couple of months to work on your favorite classical numbers. (Please send us a copy when you are done.) In between the full orchestral arrangements and the piano scores are books showing all the parts for string quartets and other small groupings. These are almost ideal for a six- to nine-voice synthesizer, although they will be extremely challenging, as the ones that I have seen have been very complex and have a lot of techniques that are difficult to program. When getting piano sheet music, be aware that there may be versions even more simplified for the benefit of beginning pianists. You should get the most complex version that you can. Unlike the pianist, you can take your time and enter one note at a time. The books that contain "101 Great Rock & Roll Hits" generally have very simple arrangements that will not sound great without a lot of embellishments on your part. Numbering Measures ------------------ Visual Composer will tell you what measure you are on. Numbering the measures on the sheet music will save you a lot of time in correlating the sheet music and the VC score. If you don't want to mess up the sheet music, make a xerox. You will be making other marks on it as well. If the music is complex, it is best to just number the measures as you go along. Tempo changes or beat changes can mess up your numbering. The Game Plan ------------- There are many approaches to transcribing music scores. If the notes for the melody, harmony, etc, are clearly differentiated (such as in "Flight of the Bumblebee"), it is easier to enter one "Voice" for the entire piece, then go back and enter the next, etc. If the notes intertwine and are otherwise less clearly separated into Voices in the music score, it is probably better to work on from one measure to a screen full of measures at a time, but no more. If you get too far ahead with one or two voices in a complex score, you may lose track of some odd notes along the way that never get entered. You should also stop and play each screen full of input as you go along. It is easier to find and correct errors as you go then after you have completed the entire score. If you are certain that the music has no percussion, switch to the "without percussion" option, which increases the number of non-percussion Voices from 6 to 9. Even if you don't think you need 9 Voices, we will later see that you can use them all. Cutting and Pasting ------------------- Before starting to enter notes, go through the sheet music looking for (and marking) phrases or passages that repeat. Marking them in advance will keep you from overlooking them later and doing a lot of unnecessary work. Even if there are some minor differences between two similar passages, copying passages and making the changes is usually much easier than keying in the same notes from scratch. If the same notes are played in a different key, it is easy to highlight them and move them up and down the scale. Even when entering a single Voice, if you see that it repeats the same note for many measures (which happens most often with the bass or drum parts), then enter one measure, mark it, and then hit Ctrl-V to copy it for the appropriate number of measures. If you know there are a lot of volume changes in the passage to be copied, make those changes before copying the passage. Entering Volume changes is a slow and not-particularly-fun process, and you don't want to have to make them twice. If you forget, go ahead and delete the duplicate passage, make the volume changes in the first passage, and then copy it over again. Assigning Notes to Voices: ------------------------- This may seem obvious, but it bears stating: try to stick to the same Voices for the same parts of the music as much as possible. If the music switches between chords in the treble cleff and chords in the bass cleff, the middle Voices will have to move between the two, but the top note should almost always be Voice One and the bottom note of the bass cleff, the last Voice. The reason for this is that after entering all the notes, you will probably be trying out different instruments, pitches, and volumes, so you will want the use of the Voices to be consistent. The exception to the above is that if you have to use a Voice for just a few notes in one particular place, try using a Voice that you have already used, but which is not being used in that particular place. That will keep you from using up one Voice for just a few notes. Assigning Instruments --------------------- After entering all of the notes, I listen to the original artist's recording of the music. (Since I see the purpose of transcribing music as being a way to learn more about and to become more appreciative of my favorite musical pieces, I normally have a recording.) Then I try to assign instruments to match the recording. I add percussion at this time, also to match the recording. The sheet music for piano will not show the percussion or fill-in or "embellishment" instruments like trumpet. Starting about measure 12 in AINT-TOO, you will hear some trumpet "highlights". I got these from listening to the recording, not from the sheet music. It is usually pretty easy to add these things by listening to a little bit of the recording at a time. This is easier to do if it is on tape, so if you have it on compact disc, make a recording of the disc. As I listen to the recording, I focus on one instrument at a time, such as the percussion, and try to follow on the sheet music at the same time, making marks to indicate where drum beats and cymbols (etc) come in. Some kind of short-hand notation will make this easier (eg: just but a "b" for bass drum, "s" for snare, etc). Since the instruments in Ad Lib are not going to sound exactly like the real things, and since Ad Lib is limited in the number of different Voices it allows, it takes a lot of experimentation to find the best combination of instruments. The hardest thing is to find the best instrument to carry the vocal part, assuming there is one. I was pleased with the sound of the Oboe for the vocal part in "Mull of Kintyre", but it did not sound as good in some other pieces. All you can do is keep experimenting. Sheet music normally shows all the words, but does not indicate when words are to be sung by someone other than the lead singer. Make note of these things when listening to the recording and change instruments accordingly. In fact, there may be some backup singing on the recording not shown on the sheet music at all. Some Voices are intended for certain areas of the scale, and will not do well in other areas. For example, I just heard a piece where a banjo was used in the two measures below middle C, and it sounded bad. Changing to CLAVECIN gave a better banjo-like sound in the lower registers. In fact, since the piece was a polka, I changed an even lower-pitched banjo to TUBA1 and it improved the sound. Left-Over Voices ---------------- If you are lucky, after entering all the music, you may have a Voice or two left over. This is good because that means you can copy the vocal or other key Voice over to the extra Voice(s) and create a fuller sound. I never leave a Voice blank. The way to create a fuller, richer sound is to copy the notes for one Voice over to a second Voice, and then vary the pitch accuracy. In "Mull of Kintyre", three (or sometimes more) Voices are used for the Bagpipe parts with the pitches at .95, 1, and 1.05. You can also vary the instruments for the extra Voices. Use Piano1 on one, Piano2 on another, etc. Be sure to listen to the Voices individually (Ctrl-Y) as well as together. Some instruments are too soft to hold their own when mixed with others. You may have to adjust the Volume for such instruments too. Volume Changes -------------- Most of the Ad Lib music files I have seen don't have any volume variations in them. VC allows volume changes from 0.1 to 1.0. Volume must be individually set for each "Voice". The way the volume control works in VC is one of its few major design weaknesses. Using it is a lot of work, which is probably why most people skip it, but it is worth the effort. If everything is done at the same volume, the sound is very bland. This is where sheet music comes in handy. It is very difficult to detect all the subtle volume changes by just listening, but with sheet music, you should see symbols telling you how to vary the volume. However, you also have to listen to your final work and note where volume adjustments are needed due to the nature of Ad Lib. For example, different instruments have different inherent volumes, so if the sheet music calls for "pp" and at the same time, it is going from a predominantly loud instrument to a soft one, you will not need to adjust the volume any more than that. Likewise, if you are going from a series of chords to a single Voice being played, there is going to be a natural drop in volume simply because Ad Lib plays chords louder than single notes. As I work on the volume changes for a piece, I try to set a scale for the volume so that I can be consistent. For example, the scale might range from .5 for "ppp" to 1 for "fff", or it might only be .8 for "ppp" to 1 for "fff", depending on the instruments being used and how the music actually sounds when played. For "William Tell Overture", I had to adjust the range of volume many times because the jumps from "pp" to "ff" were just too jarring, in my opinion. Lastly, if the music has a vocal, focus on the Voice(s) in the recording to see which words are stressed and put extra volume on the them, even though this won't show up on the sheet music. For example, in "The Chain", the vocals are "DAMN your love. DAMN your lies.", so I upped the volume on the "damn's", even though this is not shown in the sheet music. The main thing is that no matter what the sheet music shows, you should always do what sounds best to you. Tempo Changes ------------- Tempo changes are how you work magic in Ad Lib. Tempo changes are the only ones that affect all of the Voices at once, so at least you do not have to go through and change the tempo for each instrument. At the simplest level, tempo changes can be used to play trills and grace notes, which are a series of notes meant to be played very quickly. For an example, load the file WILLTELL.ROL into Visual Composer, change the display to Tempo, and go to measure 74. You will see that in the last fourth of that measure, the tempo changes to 5 for 1-1/4 measures and then back to 1. That means that 5 quarter-measures (1-1/4 = 5/4ths) are being compressed into the space of one measure by increasing the playing speed to 5x. These numbers were chosen based on two factors: (1) the number of notes to be played (8 notes could not have been played in less space) and (2) the desire to make the start of the next measure still begin on a measure bar line. Load "The Chain", stay with the Tempo Display, and look at measure 9. In the sheet music, measure 9 starts with four grace notes shown before any other notes are played. To allow the rest of the notes in that measure to start at the beginning of the measure, I added a whole new measure for the grace notes, but I changed the tempo of that measure to 10 (the fastest possible). I adjusted the length of the grace notes in VC so that they sounded right to me. That left a pause in the first part of that measure, but at a speed of 10, it is not noticeable. (Mark that measure and play it to see.) Now load the file "AINT-TOO" and look at measure 1. Because I was ad-libbing a drum intro, I was able to change the tempo to 2 temporarily without having to worry about expanding the measure accordingly, and I was still able to start the main score on the measure bar to match the sheet music. (Note that the first measure on the sheet music would be numbered 2, since I added a measure.) Now look at measure 3. In this case, grace notes are played at the same time other non-grace notes are being played. Again, a quarter of a measure is being expanded to fill 5/4 measures, so the tempo is set to 5x. The notes in that quarter measure that are not grace notes had to be lengthened proportionally. A note that spanned the 1/4 measure would be lengthened to span 5/4 measures at the 5x tempo. "Triplets" consists of a set of (usually) three 8th notes that must be played in the space of two 8th notes. Here is how to do it: enter the first two notes as 16th notes and the third as an 8th note. Change the Tempo from 1 to .7 for the first two notes, then to 1.3 for the third, and then back to 1. Here are the mathematics: the average Tempo is still 1 for that section, and the 8th note, which is twice as long as a 16th note, is played at roughly twice the tempo at which the two 16th notes are played, so everything balances out. This will only work if either no other notes are being played at that time or if the other notes are being sustained across that stretch (in which case they will not be affected because the average tempo for that stretch is still 1). If other regular 8th or 16th notes ARE being played at the same time, you'll have to fake a triplet like this: enter the first note as an 8th note, skip a 16th space, and then enter the third voice as a 16th note. Then change to another Voice and go back to enter the middle note as an 8th note that starts in the middle of the first 8th note. It looks a little like this: __ -- - As a last resort, you can do triplets by expanding the number of ticks per beat by a factor of 3x, but that makes the measures so long that it you may not even get one measure on a screen. This makes it more difficult and time consuming to enter and edit music.1 More Uses of Tempo Changes -------------------------- Load the file "TOGETHER", set Display to Tempo, and scroll through the first part of the score to see how many Tempo changes are used. The "incoming mortar" sound at the start is an ingenious use of tempo changes, pitch changes, instrument selection, overlapping notes, and pitch placement. (This originally came from the Programmers Reference Manual.) Beat Changes ------------ In some pieces, the beat may change from, say, 3/4 time to 4/4 time. VC can handle it - all you have to do when transcribing music is change the beat via the Display menu when you are ready to enter notes at a different beat. When you have entered notes at one beat, numbering the measures on your sheet music as you go, and then change the beat, the measure markers will change for the whole score, throwing off your numbering. This will NOT affect the timing of the notes you have already entered. The measure markers are for reference only. All this means is that the numbering on your sheet music will look funny at the point where the beat changes. Pitch Changes ------------- We've already discussed some uses of Pitch changes, so this is just a recap: 1. In real life, instruments are not all in perfect pitch, so vary the pitch of your instruments by a percentage point or two for more realism. 2. If you are using two instruments to play the same notes, varying their pitch is even more important to keep them from washing each other out. Slurs & Bends: Pitch changes can be used to create note slurs and pitch "bends" (moving from one note to another without "hitting another key"). Pitch can be varied from 0 to 2. The testing that I have done seems to indicate that going from 0 to 1 does not increase a full tone, but going from 1.5 to 1 decreases by a full tone. As always, experimenting is called for. Like Volume changes, Pitch changes are a bit of a pain, since you usually have to make at least four changes just to get a decent sounding bend. Again, refer to the start of the piece TOGETHER for a use of pitch bends. Also scroll through the song and look for a more traditional use of a pitch bend. - - - - - - - - - - - - end of VC tips file - - - - - - - - - - - - [The following is a pre-release copy of an article that will appear in the March 1990 issue of PsL News. This file may not be copied prior to March 15, 1990.] PC Music Making Copyright 1990 Nelson Ford This is an expanded version of an article from the 3/90 issue of PsL News. The added material is indented from both margins. - - - - - - - The PC was obviously never intended by IBM to be a killer game/music machine. The original IBM Monochrome Display adapter would not do graphics and the speaker was designed only for emitting an occassional beep. The PC's sound system is normally limited to playing a single note ("voice") at a time; the sounds it makes are just tones - it cannot emulate different musical instruments; and the quality of the speaker is only marginally better than a tin can on a string. Despite these limitations, games and music playing programs, as crude as they were, soon came out for the PC. The BASIC programming language, which was built into each IBM-PC, contained commands for playing music. People took advantage of that to play the melodies of songs, which was all the one-voice limitation of the PC would allow. Programmers even wrote software for entering and playing these monophonic tunes. PC-Musician and Music2 (disk # ) are two examples. In addition, some programs turned the keyboard into a piano keyboard on which you could play one-voice tunes. PC-Synth lets you play and record music from the keyboard by pressing the letter corresponding to the note (C for middle C, for example). It also has relatively sophisticated features such as Vibrato and Glissando, although it is still limited to monophonic play. "Monophonic" and "one-voice" both refer to being able to play one note at a time. It would take three "voices" to play a simple three-note piano chord, for example. "Polyphonic" means that multiple notes, such as chords or multiple one-voice instruments such as trumpets and violins, can be played. Polyphonic Music Neil Rubenking was the first person to write a program for the stock PC that would allow multiple voices (eg: three- or four-note chords). His Pianoman program (disk # ) simulates multiple voices by alternating very quickly between the notes for the different voices. The resulting sound works well for many types of music. The idea is not that you are going to get a life-like rendition of the music, but that you get a different, but enjoyable version played on the computer. The Pianoman program disk can be used to create music files that can be compiled into self-playing files. A large collection of self-playing files is available separately (disk # ). Our favorites are the William Tell Overture, Circus, and the theme from Monty Python, each of which is ideally suited for the approach used by Pianoman and are quite enjoyable despite all of the inherent limitations. In 1985, programmers began taking advantage of techniques that allow true polyphonic music on the PC's speaker. Tim Holden was the first to write a popular true polyphonic music playing utility for the PC. His program, Vmusic (disk # ) requires you to use a text editor to create files with the notes and other controls in them for playing by Vmusic. Vmusic actually has quite a few relatively sophisticated capabilities (one example: the ability to handle triplets), although a graphical interface for entering music scores would increase its value tremendously, and it is still unable to emulate instruments. Music Cards While Holden's Vmusic pushed the limits of the PC hardware, other companies developed add-in cards for the PC that could be programmed not only for polyphonic sounds, but which could also emulate different musical instruments. External amps and speakers hooked up to the cards generate a sound quality many magnitudes better than the PC's cheesy speaker. Sierra, a company that makes a lot of games for the PC, has been a leader in supporting add-in music cards such as the Game Blaster, the Ad Lib, and others. Game Blaster costs well under $100 and has poor sound (relative to more expensive cards, not relative to the PC's speaker). The Covox Speech Thing, a $49 device, is also supported by most Sierra games, and despite its name, Sierra uses it for music and sound effects rather than for speech, and there is no music composition software for it. The Ad Lib retails for $180 and is sold by PsL for under $110. Its sound is significantly better than Game Blaster's. It is not only supported by many games, but it will play music files such as are found in PsL. For those who want to compose or transcribe music, the Visual Composer can be added. Ad Lib's Visual Composer has from nine to eleven voices to which you can assign any of a lot of different instruments that come with it. While lots of instrument files come with VC and more can be found in the public domain, another optional program lets you create instruments the way you want them to sound. Best of all, the Ad Lib Pop-Tunes program lets you play music files on your computer while you run other programs, so you can listen to music on your computer all day while you compute. Sound Blaster is by the same company that makes Game Blaster, C/MS (not to be confused with a MIDI company named CMS). Its PsL price is $175 and it features compatability with Ad Lib and Game Blaster. It also allows digitizing sounds through a microphone, such as voice or sound effects or instruments. Unfortunately, this is a new card and while there is a lot of software that will run on it by its emulating Ad Lib or Game Blaster, there is little or no software available yet that takes advantage of all of the Sound Blaster's features. MIDI As good as Ad Lib is, you will never confuse its instruments with the real things. Also, while the Visual Composer is quite easy to use, entering notes on the screen with a mouse can be a slow procedure. A MIDI interface and an inexpensive music keyboard/synthesizer to generate the sounds, along with "sequencing" software, allows you to key music into the Ad Lib and even play music back through the synth, taking advantage of the higher quality instrument sounds built into the synth. Using MIDI with Ad Lib requires an MPU-compatible MIDI card, the Ad Lib Visual Composer, and the Ad Lib MIDI Supplement software. All of these things are available from PsL. You should be aware that most low-cost MIDI keyboard/synthesizers are relatively limited in the number of different instruments they support. So despite the better-sounding instrument sounds in MIDI synths, you can actually get better sound in some cases from the Ad Lib synthesizer because of the ability to create (or use already created) instrument sounds that more closely match the TYPE of sound you need. For example, the Kawai MS710 keyboard/synth has one sound patch for "strings" (violins). With Ad Lib, there are at least six different types of violin sounds available. So although the quality of the Ad Lib sounds is not as good, the variety makes up for it in many cases. A large number of different music composition and sequencing programs are available for the PC. A large number of different music hardware systems exist as well. Fortunately, the computer and music machine makers got together and settled on a standard named the "Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). MIDI is the hardware standard that allows devices to be hooked up to each other and communicate. MPU-401 is a "smart" MIDI card that allows software to more easily do more sophisticated tricks. More programs are written for MPU-compatible cards than any others. The non-serious hobbyist may be able to safely ignore the MPU standard if you are happy with the software that is available for the MIDI card you are getting, simply because you may never want any other software. If so, you can save $50 or so. Note that Ad Lib DOES require an MPU compatible card. Getting into MIDI can be intimidating because there are a tremendous number of different options and sorting through them all to find the "best" system is a foreboding task. Although plenty of low-cost MIDI-compatible equipment is available, the MIDI magazines from which the novice might hope to get some guidance are aimed primarily at professional musicians. The MIDI forum on CompuServe is better. At least a novice can post a question there and hope for some useful advice, depending on the interests and expertise of the other participants. The response we received ranged from none to terrific. We called all of the music stores in Houston; at the only one that carried low-cost keyboards, we were never able to get anyone to talk to us. We called wholesalers and discount music dealers around the country and had trouble getting information from the best (reportedly) of them. The phones of the well-known Sam Ash stores in New York were busy every time we called. (Something to keep in mind should you ever have a problem with an order from them.) Others took our number and never got back to us. MIDI Keyboards The most common type of MIDI hardware device is a keyboard with built-in amp, speakers, and music synthesizer. (It is also possible to get a synthesizer without a keyboard, such as the Roland MT-32, a popular, but not great nor inexpensive synth.) A popular non-keyboard MIDI synthesizer is the Roland MT-32, mainly because Sierra pushes it for use with its games. However, it is not very highly thought of by the MIDI users we asked, it is not cheap, and the lack of a keyboard will be significant for some people. In the low-price range (under $300), you can expect to find a keyboard with a 49-key, four-octave keyboard with mid-sized keys. While this looks like a toy (and in some stores, inexpensive keyboards with MIDI output are sold as toys), you can quickly become accustomed to playing on it. The major drawback to such a keyboard is that the reduced number of octaves makes the playing of some wide-ranging compositions difficult, if not impossible. The very high and low keys are just not there. In addition, the smaller keys do not lend themselves to serious piano playing. We consider any keyboard with mid-size keys and less than five octaves to be of use only for keying into and playing from sequencing software. Even on these keyboards, the instruments sound much more like the real things than the Ad Lib or Sound Blaster cards do because most of them use digitized recordings ("sampling") of actual instruments. They still might not fool anyone in a blindfold comparison to the real instruments, but the worst synthesizer made is still infinitely better than the PC's speaker. In general, the more bits used in the sampling, the better the sound will be. The number of bits used range from 8 to 16. Cheap Casio keyboards are available everywhere. Many of these do not have a MIDI interface, but even worse, many of the low-cost ones use 8-bit or 12-bit sampling. Low-cost Kawai keyboards use 16-bit sampling. In fact, we found in a comparison that the Kawai MS710 had more features and higher sampling rates than Casio keyboards costing twice as much. However, one advantage of the Casio is cheaper keyboards (<$400) that have full-size keys. When buying a low-cost keyboard, you have to keep in mind that even though it may look like a piano keyboard, getting a small MIDI keyboard is not about playing the piano (primarily). It is about playing an entire band, chamber music ensemble, or even an orchestra. It is about enjoying and learning more about music in general. Even low-cost keyboards have a couple of dozen instrument sounds built in, plus a wide range of percussion sounds which can be made to play automatically in a wide variety of tempos. By playing with the different instruments, you learn to recognize and appreciate them more in all the music that you hear. In the mid-price range ($400-$1000), you can get 61-key keyboards that span five octaves and have full-size keys. Many professional musicians use this size keyboard, which should be sufficient for popular music, although it still will not have the number of octaves required by some classical music. As you get above $600, you get extra features that make the keyboard more suitable as a piano substitute. Keys may be weighted for a better touch, and the keyboards may be touch sensitive and pressure sensitive. Keyboards that are not touch-sensitive always generate the same volume, no matter how hard you hit the keys. Touch (or velocity) sensitive keys sound louder the harder you hit them. To show you have subjective all of this is, some people told us they love the Kawai K1-II, others said that the K1-II is no good and that it is worth the extra money to get the K4. Others preferred the Roland U-20. These keyboards cost from $800-$1500. Since it is so subjective, you should really try listening to these keyboards at a music store before buying. Composition Software As we said, the point of MIDI is usually not the ability to play a single instrument, but to create your own orchestra or band. Some mid-priced keyboards, such as the Kawai WK50, allow you to record parts for different instruments on different tracks (up to 12 on the WK50) and play them back. Even the low-cost Kawai MS710 will let you record one instrument and play it back while you play a second instrument. (This could be used to play a piano duet by yourself, for example.) But even keyboards with sequencing capabilties built in are no match for computer programs. Sequencing software will store the notes you enter and will let you edit them, change the instruments, pitch, tempo, etc, overlay other instruments, and then play it all out together. You can create your own new music, or you can learn to really appreciate your favorite music of others by doing your own MIDI arrangement. There are many approaches for composing or transcribing music on the PC. The best approach for transcribing (copying sheet music) is the notes-on-a-staff approach, because you can simply copy what you see on sheet music without even having to understand what it is. CMS's ShowTune software uses such an approach. ShowTune will also print out sheet music for notes you have entered. For composing original music or transcribing from memory, a more visual approach is better. Ad Lib's Visual Composer software uses a keyboard-related approach. Although we think that VC is very efficient and easy to use, having transcribed such pieces as "Flight of the Bumblebee" and "William Tell Overture" with it, it is a time-consuming way to go. Some people have complained that transcribing music with VC is difficult if you do not read music. If you are interested in learning more about music, this is a good way to do so - go get a book on music notation. Using the music keyboard is an easy approach for entering music. However, if you are not reasonably adept at the keyboard, you may spend more time cleaning up the music files you create than if you had entered the music manually in the first place. Several things can help make keyboard input easier: you can slow the tempo down to a crawl and do one finger at a time; a built-in metronome helps you keep the beat; and you can record a section at a time rather than having to play through the whole piece at once. The Prism software is primarily designed for recording from keyboard input. The recorded music is presented as just a list of notes, which is not the easiest form to edit, particularly for non-musicians. But Prism's tape-deck-like controls make it easy to record and play back music, once you get used to the "pressure" of keeping up with the metronome and "tape counter". Getting Started You might want to get the general music disks in the PsL just out of curiosity, but if you really enjoy music, you will most surely want some kind of music card, given their low cost. For $175 or less, the Sound Blaster promises more features than Ad Lib, and will very likely have software to support them sometime in the future, but the Ad Lib card at $110 along with the Visual Composer software at $60 give you a lot more for your money TODAY. Sound Blaster has a MIDI interface, but it requires an optional connector box and it is not MPU-401 compatible, which is a significant, though not necessarily critical, drawback. Sound Blaster's music composer software is a joke compared to Ad Lib's, but then, you can buy the Ad Lib Visual Composer and use it with the Sound Blaster. In fact, doing so is the only way to get the drivers needed to play on the Sound Blaster the public domain Ad Lib music files in the PsL. Either of these cards is worth the cost, even if you do nothing but use one to hear the sound tracks of games (such as Leisure Suit Larry) and the music files in PsL. With either system, should your interest in music grow, you can easily move up to MIDI. In fact, even if you start with the MIDI system, you may want to consider the Ad Lib or Sound Blaster (along with Visual Composer) for their many capabilities which few, if any, low-cost MIDI systems can match, such as game support and a virtually unlimited number of instrument sounds (with the Instrument Creator). If you opt to jump right into MIDI, you will need three things: a MIDI interface card, which should be MPU-401 compatible, a keyboard with MIDI output, and MIDI composition (sequencing) software. Trying to find a music store willing to sell you low-end gear could put you through a real MIDI-life crisis, so we put together a low-cost bundle with everything you need. We have tested this bundle ourselves and checked with many MIDI experts and received thumbs-up on this system all the way around. The PsL MIDI Intro System includes the Kawai MS710 keyboard, the ShowTune software (notes-on-a-staff), the Prism software (keyboard recording), and the MPU-401 compatible interface card. The price of these items purchased separately would be over $550. The cash price of the bundle is $375 (credit card price, $389). (The components are also available individually.) The 49-key MS710 keyboard with its "mid-size" keys is the best available in its price range, but you may decide you want a 61-key keyboard with full-size keys. The same bundle described above with the Kawai WK50 full-size keyboard is $200 more (a total of $575 cash/check, $598 credit card). Of course, there are a lot more additional features with the WK50 than bigger keys, such as being able to overdub up to 12 different instrument parts. The next step up is a keyboard that has more and higher-quality sampled sounds, weighted, velocity sensitive keys (hit harder = louder), and many other additional features. Most of the people we spoke to preferred the Kawai K1-II (and this consensus was verified by the fact that we found more programs and public domain music files for the K1 than anything else in its range). Of course, several of the K1 owners were lusting after the next step up, the Kawai K4, but the desire for the next better model is an endless trap in MIDIdom. The best price we were able to find for the K1-II is $695, which is a savings of several hundred dollars. The K4 lists for over $1400 and we are able to get it for you for $980. MIDI card and software are extra for either keyboard. A tremendous amount of research went into these choices and we are confident that each of these systems represents unbeatable combinations of features and prices. All of these systems are available from PsL. Chuck the Piano? We had originally hoped to be able to find for PsL'ers a low-cost MIDI keyboard which could be used to input music to Ad Lib and other software programs AND which would be a good device on which to practice and play the piano. After investigating the low-cost keyboards with the mid-sized keys, we have difficulty recommending them as a substitute for a piano. On the other hand, they are excellent for learning about the piano and for gaining a greater appreciation of all types of music and instruments. From a child's perspective, these have to be more fun and interesting than simply playing a piano, but that may be true only if the keyboard is tied into a computer. One person whose child takes piano lessons and also has a low-end electronic keyboard says that the child will put time in on the piano, but only plunks on the electronic keyboard. Another individual, who has an expensive MIDI system with full-size keyboard, told us that he has trouble getting his 8-year-old child off his computer-MIDI system, and that the child quickly picked up on how everything worked. We suspect that the difference is that for all of its features, a low-end keyboard requires the MIDI software to really be interesting. While a keyboard may have 20 or more instrument sounds, you can normally only play one at a time without the use of a computer, and even with a computer, the keyboard must have "multi-timbral" capabilities, which many low-cost keyboards do not have. Multi-timbral means being able to play more than one instrument at a time. Unlike "Voice" which refers to playing one note, each instrument in the multi-timbral set allows playing several notes on one instrument. However, this also brings into play the unit's "polyphonic" capabilities, which is how many notes can be played at once. The MS710 will play ten notes at once, so the number of notes played by all instruments within the MS710's 5-instrument multi-timbral capabilities must total no more than 10 notes at once, which is still a lot, since most instruments are mono-phonic. Another feature to look for is keyboard splitting. This can allow you to allocate part of a keyboard to different instruments, so that you could play two instruments at once. Keyboards with full-sized keys are reasonable piano substitutes, if you do not find the five-octave limitation to be too constricting. Frankly, it appears that a LOT of classical music exceeds a five-octave range. However, money is such a big factor between five-octave (61-key) keyboards (available for under $500) versus 88-key keyboards (around $2000 and up) that even classical players should consider trying a low cost electronic keyboard for a while and moving up to the 88-key keyboard when you are sure that you like electronic keyboards. A related point is that some keyboards will *play back* sound features which they cannot produce, such as higher or lower octaves than there are keys for, key velocity, etc. If you are thinking of paying in the $2000-and-up range for a piano, you should consider a full-size, 88-key electronic keyboard instead. We asked on the MIDI forum for opinions of an electronic keyboard vs an upright piano. While this group has an obvious bias, most are also trained musicians with experience with electronic and non-electronic instruments. The unanimous opinion was that short of a prodigy training to become a concert pianist, the electronic keyboard is the better choice than a piano in the same price range. It will actually have much better action and piano sound than a comparably priced piano(!), will never need tuning, never break any strings, never need mechanical adjustments, etc. The most recommended system was a Yamaha KX88 keyboard controller with a Kurzweil PX1000 sound module - a combination available discounted to under $2000. Other advantages: your child can plug in headphones and you are spared hearing two hours of fractured Chopsticks; and because the KX88 has MIDI plugs, modules can be plugged in for generating other instrument sounds. Products We had a miserable time trying to find suppliers for and information about MIDI products. The owner of "Music Alley", who has a section on CompuServe, ignored our Email, "wasn't in" when we called, and would not return calls. Calling a big discount dealer in NY got us nothing but busy signals. We originally began selling the Ad Lib card when we had the same difficulty locating that product and information about it, now we are one of the leading retailers of Ad Lib products. Frankly, we wouldn't mind being the leading retailer of non-professional MIDI equipment too. If you need big-ticket MIDI items, you shouldn't have any trouble getting help from your local music dealer. As we have previously stated, we feel it is important to be able to test the feel and sound of any high-dollar MIDI equipment, but if you don't HAVE a local music dealer, PsL will be glad to sell you high-end equipment too. PsL normally stocks the following items (prices are subject to change): List Credit Card "Cash" Price Price Price Ad Lib Music Card $180 $109.95 $105.95 - Visual Composer 90 59.95 57.95 - Instrument Maker 50 39.95 37.95 - MIDI Supplement 40 32.95 29.95 - Pop-Tunes (plays music 40 32.95 29.95 in background) - C Programmers Manual 40 32.95 29.95 Sound Blaster 250 175.95 169.95 - features stereo, voice digitizing, amp, more voices, Ad Lib compatibility. Covox Speech Thing 70 49.95 47.95 - text-to-speech; supported by many games. MIDI Intro System 550 389.00 375.00 - MPU-401 compatible MIDI interface card by CMS - ShowTune music transcription and playback software - Prism music recorder, editor and librarian. - Kawai MS710 keyboard/synth with 16-bit sampled sounds, 49 mid-sized keys, stereo chorus, pitch bend, vibrato, one-finger ad-lib, 5 instr. multi-timbral, 500-note record, percussion pads, auto-percuss. MIDI Full-Size System $800 599.00 575.00 - same system as above, but with the Kawai WK50. 61 full-size keys. 12-voice recorder with overlay. 7-instrument multi-timbral, 12-note polyphonic, with keyboard split. Keyboard/Synths with weighted, velocity- & pressure-sensitive 61-key keyboards: ----------------- Kawai K1-II $1100 716.00 695.00 Kawai K4 1500 1010.00 980.00 Components: ---------- CMS MPU-compatible card $160 139.00 133.00 Kawai MS710 Keyboard 200 179.00 169.00 Kawai WK50 Keyboard 450 375.00 359.00 Prism Software 100 77.00 74.00 Showtune Software 100 77.00 74.00 ----------------------------------- Public (software) Library P.O.Box 35705 Houston, TX 77235-5705 Orders Only: 1-800-2424-PSL Info & Help: 1-713-524-6394 FAX Number: 1-713-524-6398 CompuServe ID #: 71355,470