Ian Waugh investigates the the expansion of the Music 5000 with the Music 2000 and Music 3000 units.

Product: Music 3000 Expander
Price: £115.00 inc. VAT

Product: Music 2000 MIDI Interface
Price: £161.00 inc. VAT

Supplier: Hybrid Technology Limited, 273 The Science Park, Cambridge CB4 4WE. Tel. (0223) 420360

The Hybrid Music System has been in a continuous state of development ever since the launch of the Music 500 back in 1985. We reviewed the much friendlier Music 5000 in November 1986 (Vol. 5 No. 6) and the accompanying keyboard, the Music 4000, the following year in our Aug/Sept issue (Vol. 6 No. 4).

There is also the Music 1000, an 8 watt stereo amplifier with three headphone sockets (ideal for education), and suitable for powering bookshelf speakers. To complete the line-up, the Music 2000 was launched last year and the Music 3000 this year.

To recap, the Hybrid Music System is a fully-integrated, self-contained synthesiser and music composition system controlled entirely from software. At its heart is the AMPLE Nucleus ROM (AMPLE standing for Advanced Music Production Language and Environment). AMPLE is a programming language specially designed for music, and one of its main features is concurrency, the ability to do more than one thing at the same time allowing several music parts to play together.

The sounds come from the Music 5000, the basic module of the system, which can produce eight different voices at once. Music parts can be entered in traditional notation in the Staff Editor, in an MCL (Music Composition Language) in the Notepad text editor, or in real-time from the Music 4000 keyboard, and individual parts which make up a piece can be mixed together using a graphic-based computer Mixing Desk.

The Hybrid Music System is widely used in education and has a growing number of individual users.

The basic Music 5000 has two main limitations - it can only play a maximum of eight voices at once and it can't access external voices via MIDI, the standard music interface (see later). Enter the Music 3000 and Music 2000. Both are housed in the same BBC beige box and both connect to the Music 5000 (and hence the BBC micro) via a 1MHz bus cable. Both, thoughtfully, have follow-on sockets to allow further daisy chaining, and both fully integrate into the existing Hybrid Music System through additional controlling software which loads from the system disc.

If you have produced pieces with the Music 5000, you'll have no problem using the Music 3000. Its function is simply to add another eight voices to the system. This allows you to create bigger "drum kits" and six or eight-note piano parts, while still leaving plenty of voices for other sounds. You could even use all sixteen voices to create one gigantic instrument! The extra voices can also be used for special effects such as Echo which eats voices like laryngitis.

A single music part can contain up to twelve voices, and the number of parts the system can support rises to ten.

The unit is completely transparent in use. The only operational change to the software is the inclusion of an additional eight sets of channels in the Mixing Desk. If you try to move the cursor off the right of the screen these new channels appear numbered 9, A, B,C, D, E, Fand G.

This increased power is terrific, but when you come to enter a score for a 16-piece ensemble you may run into a problem - lack of memory.

In these days of 16-bit and 32-bit computers, the poor old BBC is showing its limitations but, as of writing, Hybrid has firmly stated that it does not intend to produce an Archimedes version.

A second, minor problem may also become apparent if you do use more than eight voices - the "mix" word may not fit into the Notepad. Hopefully this will act as a spur to Hybrid to release a more fully-featured text editor.

The Music 2000 is powered from the BBC's power supply and this has a follow-on socket, too. It has three MIDI Out sockets, one MIDI In, and there are three LEDs on the front which flash when data is being transmitted. Useful.

The Music 2000 software adds new words to the AMPLE language (see figure 1). The number of voices available now rises dramatically from eight to 32, and an arrangement can consist of up to nine parts each with up to 12 voices (within the 32 voice limit).

The following are not part of the MIDI software but may often be used in word definitions.

This isn't the place for a MIDI tutorial but briefly, MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is a sort of hi-tech musical instrument Esperanto which allows different instruments to communicate with each other. It is ideally suited to controlling instruments from a computer. MIDI can handle a wide range of messages. The basic ones include Note On and Note Off information and the system can handle timing information too, to allow drum machines and sequencers to run in sync.

These basic control messages are built into the software, and voice assignments are carried out in the mix words. A sample mix, mix9 (see figure 2), is supplied on disc. You can *EXEC this into a program and after making a few alterations to the mix you will be able to play a simple piece via MIDI. The four most important words are probably these:

MIDIV makes a voice a MIDI voice (as opposed to a Music 5000 voice).

MIDICHANNEL selects the MIDI channel number. MIDI can transmit different music parts on up to 16 different channels allowing you to select which sounds on your MIDI equipment each music line is heard with.

MIDILINE selects the MIDI Out socket to be used - 1, 2 or 3.

MIDIPROGRAM selects a new patch or sound on the receiving MIDI instrument.

Together, they might be used like this:

1 SHARE 3 VOICES MIDIV
1 MIDILINE 2 MIDICHANNEL
8 MIDIPROGRAM

This assigns three voices to part one and transmits them on channel two through MIDI socket one and selects patch number 8.

You can freely mix Music 5000 and MIDI voices, although the MIDI voices, obviously, do not appear in the Mixing Desk. Using AMPLE and the new MIDI words, you can construct and transmit virtually any MIDI message or combination of messages. Using the hierarchical nature of the language, you can do this from just one word, too.

It is easy to program changes in tempo on the Hybrid Music System, and this feature is carried over to MIDI control. Programmable tempo changes are not possible on all MIDI-based sequencers, and few drum machines can perform tempo changes on their own.

An alternative method of rhythm programming is to build a music part from the notes which trigger the sounds on a drum unit. The manual includes words which let you create drum patterns on a grid similar to that used by Roland drum machines and found in most books containing drum machine patterns.

Expanders are synthesisers without a keyboard. Most are multi-timbral which means they can play several different music lines using different voices at the same time (each would be tuned to a separate MIDI channel). Through the Music 2000 you can use the Music 4000 keyboard to play voices on a MIDI-compatible instrument. The Music 2000 reproduces all the elements of standard AMPLE notation on MIDI voices except one - the slur. This is the sounding of a sequence of notes without retriggering the sound's attack phase. The MIDI specification was basically designed for keyboards and does not have a slur command. The Music 5000 voices, of course, can play slurs.

One other point to bear in mind: loudness is expressed as key velocity so MIDI instruments must be velocity sensitive if dynamics are to be heard. Again, the Music 5000 voices are velocity sensitive. The greatest disappointment, if you like, about the Music 2000 is the MIDI In socket. This is not supported by any high level AMPLE words, and it is doubtful whether Hybrid intends to make any available in the future. Oddly, the MIDI In socket was specially included late in the development stage. However, it is rumoured that some enterprising users have written their own machine code patches to support MIDI In although I am not personally aware of any.

This lack of support means that programs such as voice editors - should some enterprising individual write some - would be limited to a one-way conversation, and voice data could not be saved to disc - one of the great benefits of computer-based voice editors. It also means that a MIDI keyboard cannot be used for recording.

The Music 2000, therefore, must be the controlling instrument in any MIDI set-up. It has no sync to tape facility either, so you cannot overdub onto tape. However, I suspect that won't concern the vast majority of users.

It's rather a shame that the 2000 isn't the same price as the 3000, but remember that if you are interested in using the system purely for MIDI, you also need to the Music 5000.

If you already have a Music 5000 and want more voices for your System, the Music 3000 represents unbeatable value, breaking as it does Hybrid's traditional 161 price point. It is by far the cheapest music expander on the market.

If you like the power and flexibility of AMPLE but would like to apply it to a greater variety of sounds and instruments, the Music 2000 is for you. Its ability to transmit any MIDI message makes it among the most powerful MIDI controllers on the market. In spite of some operational restrictions, it is an extremely exciting addition to the Hybrid Music System in particular and the world of computer-based music in general.