*********************************** AM/FM ***********************************     The AM/FM MED tutorial - Part 1     The Basics    Preface: Welcome to the MED tutorial for beginners! We'll start from very bottom - so even if you haven't so much as touched one of these "tracker" programs before, you'll be a real whizz by the time we're done with you. Well, maybe not quite, but add a few hundred hours of practice, and you're getting there. Making music on the Amiga, like everything else, requires practice. But don't despair, because if you're the musical kind you will no doubt enjoy this practice. If you're already an experienced MED- or ProTracker user, you will gain nothing by reading this tutorial, so you might as well skip it. It is meant for beginners only. Also, before we go on, let us remind you all that if there's anything you don't understand or if we have missed something out - write to us! We have both experienced users of the program and the author of MED, Teijo Kinnunen himself, in our staff, so I think we can promise you an answer. We will assume that you have some basic knowledge of music and musical terms, though. If you don't know what an octave, a D sharp or a quarter- note is, we suggest you get a book or a friend to teach you these basic things before moving on. This tutorial will also assume that you have MED version 3.00 or later. If you only have version 2.00 or 2.13, you will still be able to pick up some useful help, but if you want to follow it step by step, hurry up and get the latest version from a PD company or from the author. (At the time of writing this, 3.2 is the current version). Off we go: Right, let's get to it! First - load MED by clicking it's icon or just type it's filename from CLI. The screen you are presented with is split in two - the upper part and the lower part. This is the way MED works most of the time. Right now, in the upper part of the screen is the File-selector, and in the lower part, there's the music-editor itself, where you will tap your music into. The screen may look rather messy at the in the beginning, but that's because there are so many functions and options. Take it easy, though - we will go through them one at a time. The first thing to do is to load an instrument, so we have something to play around with. Dig up your favourite instrument disk, and use the file- requester to pick an instrument to load. Let's pick a piano sound or something similar - not a drum sound (yet). To actually read it from the disk, click on "Instr" under the "Load" gadget. Now try pressing different keys on the keyboards, and you should hear the sound playing at various pitches. What really happens is that the sample is played at various speeds, giving different pitches, or notes. You're probably used to using a piano, and the Amiga keyboard may seem strange to play on, but it's really quite neatly set up to act more or less like a piano keyboard. Here are the keys and which note each of them will trigger: Amiga Key Note triggered Z C S C# (C sharp or, if you prefer, D flat) X D D D# C E V F G F# B G H G# N A J A# M B (in some countries called H) As you can see, it's set up more or less like a real keyboard, with the bottom row on the Amiga keyboard (ZXCV..) being the white keys on the piano, and the second row (ASDF..) being the black keys on the piano. Likewise, the keys Q, 2, W, 3, E, R, 5, T, 6, Y, 7, U give the same scala, only an octave higher. Try playing around with it for a while, you will soon become familiar with it. Also, by pressing the keys F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5, you can move the range covered by the Amiga's keyboard, F1 gives octaves 1 and 2, F2 gives octaves 2 and 3, and so on. Remember that there is a limit to how fast you can play a sample, so only octaves 1, 2 and 3 will work on a sampled instrument. That's why you can't hear any difference after pressing F4 or F5. The highest octaves can only be used with MIDI instruments or synthetic instruments - we'll look into that later, but for now let's stick to this one sampled instrument and the 3 lower octaves. Steps, Tracks, Blocks and Songs The lower part of the screen contains the editor itself. This is where you will actually make your music, by tapping notes and commands into these 4 rows of 64 lines each. You can't see all 64 lines on screen at once, but you can use your arrow keys to move up and down. As you can see, the 64 lines are numbered 0 to 63, and the 4 rows are numbered 0 to 3. The 4 rows represent the 4 different Amiga sound channels, that means 4 sounds can be played simultaneously at any one time. Whereas the 64 lines each represent a 16th note, all of them together making up 4 measures of music. Are you following us so far? If not, read it again and make sure you do, because these are the basics, and you do need to know them. One line of 64 steps (16th's) are known as ONE TRACK. The four tracks together are what make up ONE BLOCK. Many BLOCKS played one after another make up a SONG. Make sure you're familiar with these terms before moving on, or you will be completely lost pretty soon. Composing our first song (err..) Ok, we're ready to start on our first song. Around the middle of the screen, just above the block-display (editor), you will see a tiny little "E". If you press ESC, this E will toggle between white and black. When the E is black (highlighted), that means you are in EDIT mode, and any notes you play on the keyboard will be entered into the block. Try it, and just enter some notes here and there - don't worry about the musical qualities just yet. When you feel you have entered enough notes, press ESC again to turn the EDIT mode off. Whatever you play on your keyboard now will NOT be entered into the block. Ok! Let's play back the masterpiece we just made! On the upper part of the screen, right hand side, you will find a button that says "PLAY". Click on this, and the upper part of your screen will show the various play options. Now click on "Play Block" - voila! You are listening to your very own, and very first, composition. Might not exactly sound like Dire Straits, but don't worry about that just yet - first we need to find out how it all works. Assuming you entered all your notes into the same TRACK (sound channel), you can now go back to edit mode by pressing ESC, move your cursor to the next track and then enter some notes there as well. All done, press ESC again to turn off edit mode, and hit "Play Block" once again. You will now hear both your first set of notes and your second set of notes, each in their own track, playing simultaneously. This is getting to be quite noisy now, but ignore that, and now follow the same procedure with the remaining 2 tracks as well. When you have entered notes in all 4 tracks, it should all be a fine mess which sounds absolutely horrible. It does? Well, let's just call it experimental new-wave music for now. Getting groovy But let's forget about these horrible noises for a while, and see if I can help you make something that sounds more traditional. First we need to load some other instruments, though. Have a look on the middle of the screen, just above the block editor. Somewhere it should say: "01:" and the name of the instrument you loaded a while ago. This means that the instrument you loaded is stored as instrument no. 1 in memory. Let's keep this instrument for a while, and instead move on to instrument 2. To do this, hold down the SHIFT key and press the right arrow key once. Now it should say "02:" and nothing more, which means we haven't loaded any instrument in position 2 just yet - but we're about to do that now. Click on "Files" in the upper right part of your screen, and the file requester will pop back up. Now, instead of just loading any instrument here, we're going to see if we can find a bassdrum instrument somewhere. I should think everybody has a bassdrum somewhere, so click on it, and then on "Instr" (*). The bassdrum will be loaded as instrument no. 2. Now press SHIFT+arrow right again to move on to instrument no. 3 and load a snare drum here. All done, move onto instrument no. 4 and load a hihat. ((*) If you are in lack of these sounds, get hold of AM/FM Sample Disk #1, with 45 great rock drum sounds). As you might have guessed by now, we're going to set up a drum pattern. But first let's get rid of that horrible noise we just made a while ago - the easiest way to delete it is to click on "BLOCK" and then on "BLOCK: CUT". This will delete all notes and commands from the block currently on screen, and put it into a copy buffer in case you change your mind and want it back. In that case, try "BLOCK: PASTE" and it will all reappear. But CUT it again, because we don't want it any more. Now, with SHIFT and the left/right arrow keys, move to instrument no. 2 which should be your bassdrum. Make sure your editor cursor is in the top left of the block (track 0, step 0), then press ESC to enter edit mode. We're ALMOST ready to start kicking the bassdrum, but first let's get the right pitch - this may vary a bit, but generally a C-3 should be ok for a bassdrum, so before you enter any notes, press F2 which means that the 3rd octave will be available from Q and upwards on your keyboard. Now, hit "Q", and the following should appear in step 0: "C-3 02000", and your cursor will jump one line down. (Note: If you are using drum sounds from the AM/FM Sample Disk #1, the pitch should be A-3 on all the sounds, as they are sampled on this pitch for the best possible quality). Now press arrow down 3 times, so your cursor is positioned at step 04, and then hit "Q" again to enter another bassdrum. Repeat this for every 4 steps all the way down to step 60. That should give you a bassdrum hit on patterns 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56 and 60. If you move onto the PLAY page and press PLAY BLOCK, you should hear a bass drum playing at a steady rate. Now let's add the snare as well: Use SHIFT+left/right arrows to select the snare drum instrument, move your cursor to the next track (track 1, step 0), move the cursor down until you are directly besides the SECOND bass drum hit, that's on step 04. Press Q to enter a snare drum hit here - your cursor will jump one step down and step 04 should now read: "C-3 03000". Add further snare drum hits on every second bass drum hit - that should be in steps 4, 12, 20, 28, 36, 44, 52 and 60. Press PLAY BLOCK again, and you should hear a steady rock beat. Not bad, eh? To make it sound a bit more lively though, we should add a hihat as well. Find the hihat instrument using SHIFT+left/right arrow, move your cursor to the next track (to the right of the snare drum), and press Q to enter "C-3 04000" on every second step, i.e. on step 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 etc. all the way down to step 62. Back to PLAY BLOCK again - and hey! A regular disco/rock beat! That wasn't hard, was it!?! Normally though, you can't afford to use 3 of the Amiga's 4 audio channels for drums, because you probably want to add a lot more instruments. So in the future, when you're about to start composing for real, you are likely to squeeze the whole drum beat into just ONE track, leaving the other 3 tracks free to use for bass, keyboards, guitars etc. The drums probably won't sound as good then, because you can't have both hihat and bassdrum at the same time, but when you only have 4 sound channels you have to try to use them the best you can. When you get a little more experienced, you can also mix say for instance the bassdrum sample and the hihat sample into one instrument, so you can have them both at the same time, using only one sound channel. But - more about that later! Adding up The last thing we'll look at today is how to put two or more "blocks" together to form a whole song. First, we'll copy our drums from Block 00 to Block 01. Click on "Block" and then on "Block: Copy". Then click on "New Block", and a new empty block will be created. Hold down the SHIFT key, and press arrow down. You will see your drums disappear, and the new empty block 01 will appear. Now click on "Block: Paste", and all your drums will be entered into this block. What you have now is two identical blocks, 00 and 01. One of the 4 tracks should still be empty, so pick instrument 01 (that's the piano we loaded first, remember?) again by pressing SHIFT+arrow left several times. Make sure the little E for EDIT MODE is turned on, and then enter some piano in your free track. What you have now is one block with only drums, and one track with drums and piano - we're going to make a little song out of this. On the right hand side of the screen, click on "PLAY". Now, on the top left of the screen you will see a so-called "Playing sequence", so far consisting of only one step, the block 00. Click on the arrow down (with your mouse, not on the keyboard) and press "INS" to insert another block in the playing sequence. Use the "+" and "-" gadgets to make a playing sequence looking like this: 00 01 Now click on "PLAY SONG", and you will hear your first ever song played. If you've followed our example, your song will consist of 4 bars of drums only, then some piano enter together with the drums. Now you can experiment with adding more blocks, other instruments, setting up longer playing sequences etc. Keep doing this for a couple of nights, and you will see how easy it really is! Congratulations - you have successfully(?) completed lesson 1 in the MED tutorial for beginners. We hope everything has been quite clear, although we know there are a lot of new terms and words for the absolute beginner - it might help to read it all once more, though. And remember - if there's something you can't handle after reading, re-reading and re-re-reading, write to us about your problem and we'll try to help the best we can. So until next time - keep practising - don't be afraid to experiment with the various functions. In AM/FM #3, we will take a closer look at samples - how to sample your own instruments and manipulate them to fit your song. If you're serious about using MED and follow this tutorial, it might be a good idea to buy a sound sampler before AM/FM #3 comes your way, as the next part of this tutorial will assume that you have one. See you there! *********************************** AM/FM ***********************************