Commodore 64 owners possess one of the most sophisticated sound synthesis chips on the market. Controlling it from BASIC however, is a real pain, hence the increasing number of utilities and music and voice synthesiser programs. You can pay over £50 for these programs and now as little as £i .99. So, what do Mastertronic offer for £1.99? Answer - not a lot!

What you do get however is easy to use. You compose tunes in the musically natural way, placing notes onto a five line stave, selecting the length of note, quaver to dotted semi breve, by joystick or cursor controlled pointer. Only a single note melody up to about 100 notes in length is possible, notes being selected from a 12 note scale. There's a menu of five instruments: trumpet, piano, guitar, recorder and trombone. Only the recorder is realistic (the trombone sounds more like a bass guitar), and the rest sound nothing like the real thing.

Tunes can be saved and loaded from tape and three sample tunes are included with the program. The instructions claim that the music can be printed out onto a Commodore printer, but it didn't work on my Commodore MPS 802. The most irritating feature was the inability to edit a tune, other than deleting the notes from the end.

Whilst it's very limited, it kept my five year old son quiet for a couple of hours composing er ... tunes. That's worth a couple of pounds on its own.

B.J.