¢SLAMMIN' - The SMP Column!¢by Bryan Zillwood¢¢Part 3¢¢ Continuing from last issue's creative endeavours, this time we will try to construct a complete song.¢¢ This aspect of SMP is the least well docmented feature in the English instructions provided. It took me many long hours slaving over a German dictionary to find out how it works properly.¢¢ After setting up some sounds as described last issue, the next thing to do is to create a pattern. Patterns consist of 32 notes played consecutively. These notes do not have to be of the same instrument, in fact you don't have to have a note played at all. Each note silences the previous one played, however more than one sound can be played together by utilising the four channels available.¢¢ Lets start editing. Select EDITIEREN Pattern from the menu bars in the centre of the screen. The active cursor is now the one over the "---" next to 00. Now press Q, this will put a C in position 00 in the first channel. The instrument played will be the one displayed at the top of the screen. To change the instrument selected press < and > but remember that there are two sound curves for each sound, so don't press > only once and wonder why the same instrument is being played.¢¢ You can now, using the cursor keys, position different pitches all over the four patterns. Pressing RETURN will play through the track until stopped by another key press.¢¢ For quick reference, listed below are the notes corresponding to which keys are used to generate them.¢¢ C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B¢-------------------------------------¢1) Z S X D C V G B H N J M¢2) Q 2 W 3 E R 5 T 6 Y 7 U¢¢ There is another octave which can be accessed by pressing SHIFT when using the first set of the keys above (this also includes Q). SMP also contains a drum set, press SHIFT and 1 to 9 for this. The spacebar make the note beneath the cursor blank.¢¢ OK, now you have played aroung with the different sounds and pitches, we can alter the volumes of individual notes. In the pattern table, each note looks like this: C-2 00VF, the first letter represents the pitch, the number is the octave, 00 shows which instrument is played, V is a command and F is a parameter of the command. Each of the commands is dealt with below:¢¢The command V is the most common command you will use. It is the only command which is applied to single notes and it refers to the volume of the note. The default value of V is F, which is the loudest sound. You could, using the cursor keys, move onto the value and overtype it with any hexamdecimal number from 0 to F, to change the volume. Alternatively, if you wanted, all or most notes in a pattern can share the same value by changing the default value of that pattern. At the top of the screen, just below the titles, you will notice four green and orange triangles each followed by a green vertical bar. This bar represents the default volume of the channel it is over. To move the bar use the left and right cursor keys (whilst holding Control). Any notes which are then played from the keyboard will be of the volume set by the green bar.¢¢ The command Q, and all the rest of the commands, can only be positioned where a note doesn't exist. Q is a quit pattern command. This will stop the pattern where it is and continue playing from the next pattern. The parameter is ignored.¢¢ U and D refer to up and down. According to the German text, the next highest (u) or lowest (d) note, should be played in place of the actual ones in the pattern. I don't seem to be able to get this to work, can anyone clear this up?¢¢ S, C & W are commands for machine code programmers to set up flags in songs. As I am not knowledgeable in machine code, I'm not able to provide any more information on this.¢¢ L & H are further distortion commands. These are used to set the (L)ow and (H)igh bytes in the Audio-Control register (whatever that is!)¢¢ T & M are commands altering the timing of the playback, e.g. T1 and M9 would set a gap of 25/60 seconds between notes (25=a hexidecimal 19). The default setting is 7.¢¢ J & M are jump commands. These are used to set a jump to another track, e.g. J2 and PE jumps to position 2E.¢¢ The timing and jump commands should be positioned next to each other in a pattern for them to have the desired effect.¢¢ The final command is E which, using the parameters, can gives notes a 16-bit quality. E0 turns off any previous E command, but only for that channel. E1 to 4 does not appear to modify the sound. E5 and E9 changes channel 1, E6 and EA changes channel 2 and so on. ED increases the octave of a channel by 1, EE by 2 octaves and EF by 3.¢¢ So now you can produce a pattern, or a set of 4 patterns to make a track. You will now want to put the tracks into a tune. Well select the position where you want the track to be and press Shift/Tab (set). Your patterns will then be given numbers and placed into a song. Next edit some more tracks and put them into the tune and soon you should have the whole compositition finished. What you will notice is that SMP doesn't check to see if any patterns you place have been used before, so it gives them a seperate number. Don't worry about this, just select OPTION from the menu, followed by "Speicher Aufraumen", which probably means something like tidy up. Any patterns which are the same will then be given the same number. Magic eh?¢¢ Just a few more pattern editing features now. Pressing Tab advances you 8 lines. Pressing Control/Esc saves the present pattern to a memory buffer and Control/> restores it. Control/< clears the channel the cursor is on and Shift/Control/< clears the whole pattern. Finally, to recall a pattern from the tune, press Control/Inverse.¢¢ Now you might have a wonderful masterpiece which you need to save quickly before the electricity board cuts off your power, because you have spent so long composing, you've forgotten to pay your bills. The songs can be saved either compressed or uncompressed. If you don't intend to include the tune into some program you're writing, then compression should be on. This is toggled in the OPTION menu, Music Packen ein is on and auf is off. To save the tune go to DISK Speichern (save) and you will be prompted with a filename, the extension .SNG is put in for you.¢¢ Well that's about it for how to use SMP. As I have said, I am not able to go into depth regarding incorporating tunes into programs, but if you have any queries the please contact me via NOSAUG.¢¢ I have included with this article, a short tune I created called GHOST.SNG. Apologies for the quality of the song, I was obviously never related to Beethoven, but perhaps this will inspire you to create a song or two of your own for future inclusion in Futura. I look forward to hearing your compositions.¢¢ Til then enjoy your composing.¢¢¢¢SOUND MONITOR PROFESSIONAL V1.2 is available from the NOSAUG PD Library (Disk U31).¢
