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The Music Construction Set is like building blocks for Beethoven, Lego for Liszt or Meccano for Mozart. In short, it's exactly what you'd expect something called Music Construction Set to be. It enables you to build up, edit and play tunes in a similar manner to that used by the Pinball Construction Set or indeed by many Macintosh programs.

You use a joystick or mouse to move a pointing hand around the screen and pick up the various bits that you want. These may be notes, rests, ties and so forth to be placed on the staffs as you compose your magnum opus. Alternatively, you can use the pointer to select the time signature, change the spoon or select one of the icons - they're the nine little boxes in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

These allow you to scroll through the music (using the arrows), play the music (using the piano of course), cut and paste from one tune to another and access the disc.

The house is not a house but a home - just like the Applesoft Home. It returns you to the beginning.

You can transpose the piece into another key as long as the result doesn't take it outside thr range that MCS can handle. Also, the program won't let you change key if the treble and cass clefs have different key signatures. Mind you, my composing only uses such techniques by accident.

To get the full benefit from the MCS, you need some form of auxiliary sound system. The Apple speaker is not really up to the job and if, like me, you have a fan fitted to keep the machine doon, the din it makes drowns out much of the music.

Minimally, you can direct the sound to the cassette port and thence to your stereo system. However, using either the internal speaker or the cassette port, you can only play four notes simultaneously.

You can use the on-screen volume and sound controls which aren't available via the speaker or cassette port, and the music will scroll automatically as it plays.

Having written your piece, or loaded one of the pieces from the disc, you can print it out if you have a suitable printer and an interface card that is compatible with the Apple paralell card.

It worked fine with my Epson FX-80 and Digitek SPIII card, although it had a stretched-out appearance. Because it's printed out in bit image mode though, you can't get rid of the stretching by selecting condensed print mode. The music is printed sideways so that it gets printed as one long, continuous piece.

I must admit I've always been a sucker for construction sets, and the MCS is no exception. I had fun playing with it (in both senses of the word) although I soon got fed up with using the joystick. Fortunately, there are several keyboard "shortcuts" which can be used in conjunction with the joystick and these are listed on the reference card that accompanies the manual.

If you're using a IIe, you can select keyboard-only input because the "closed-Apple" key can be used in place of the joystick button. It's a pain having to select input device sound output channel and printer type each time the disc is booted, particularly since the review copy had a habit of rebooting when trying to perform a Catalog operation.

I would have preferred the ability to set those parameters once and be offered the option to change them on boot-up. The Music Construction Set is not so much a composing tool as a musical exploration device. For my money, it's ideal for playing with music rather than for playing music.

With this attitude (and to be fair, it's one that the manual suggests) the 700-ish symbol limitation on the length of any piece fades into insignificance. Music, micro, please!