Practising on musical instruments can be a bit of a bore. You sit alone in front of your music stand and listen to your own squeaks, scapes and bad notes. The aim of Micro Maestro is to put some of the fun back into the business.

Three different packages are available and you can choose between the version for keyboard instruments, concert pitch instruments such as recorder, trombone or stringed instruments or the version for B flat instruments. These include trumpet, clarinet and French horn. Whichever version you opt for, you will get two cassettes plus a small booklet which tells you how to use the program. One cassette contains the software and the others has soundtracks of the music used. The tunes are Ghostbusters, Happy Xmas (War is Over), Chariots of Fire, Superman, Dress You Up and Hello.

Loading the software will put the first tune into memory. You can then select from a number of options. Firstly you may display the music on the screen one page full at a time. Next, the computer can play the music for you so that you can play along it. The musical notation is printed on the screen as you do this in a big, bold and clear form. It has its own way of scrolling which you soon get used to.

You can adjust the tempo so that it suits your stage of learning. You can also add a visual beat counter and a bouncing ball which marks the note currently to be played. With growing confidence you can turn the computer sound off and play the music yourself with or without the beat counter and bouncing ball. As a final touch you can play along with the audio cassette which has two versions of each tune, one being just the backing.

Pressing BREAK returns you to the main menu from which you can select a different piece of music in either treble, alto or bass clef. This is a worthwhile package. However, it is limited to the tunes supplied with it and the poor quality of the audio recordings rather spoiled the effect.

I would suggest these packages, which run on the BBC B and Electron, are more suited to the school music department, where may pupils could use them, rather than to the individual.

Rog Frost