SINCLAIR ZX Spectrum ----------- MUSICMASTER SOFTWARE BY Incognito Software Ltd. CASSETTE 48K RAM USER MANUAL FOR MUSICMASTER First published in 1983 by Sinclair Research Limited 25 Willis Road, Cambridge CB1 2AQ England ISBN 0 85016001 5 (c) Copyright Incognito Software Ltd 1983 All rights reserved. No part of this program, packaging or documentation may be reproduced in any form. Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, or sale and repurchase prohibited. Printed in UK General description MUSICMASTER enables you to create your own tunes in two modes: - by using the Spectrum keyboard to simulate a piano keyboard; we supply a keyboard overlay to help you. [see MUSICMAS.GIF] - by entering the notes by name. You can then listen to your tune, change it, add to it, and save it. You can reload any tune you have saved, and work on it again. When you create or amend a tune, the notes are both sounded and displayed on the screen. Operating instructions Connect your ZX Spectrum as shown in the diagram. Load the program with the command LOAD"" Start your cassette player and then press the ENTER key on your Spectrum. MUSICMASTER will load in four parts, and tell you when to switch off your tape recorder. It will then be ready to run. If you stop the program and later want to start it again without reloading, give the command GOTO 1. In no circumstances use the commands RUN or CLEAR; they will erase the program from memory. As you load your program you will see the five lines of the musical stave appear on the screen. The sign on the left is the treble clef which shows that the note on the stave would normally be played with the right hand on the piano keyboard. The stave can be extended on the left with little lines called leger lines, so that notes which fall outside it can be marked. The note lowest in pitch is at the left of this stave, and the highest is at the right. The gap or interval between a and A, b and B, c and C is called an octave. The notes on this stave have solid heads and vertical tails which may point either up or down - they are called crotchets. The form of a note indicates its duration - the time for which it sounds relative to the other notes in the tune. MUSICMASTER will tell you all about this. Stave or keyboard mode When you have loaded the program, you can then select either STAVE mode or KEYBOARD mode by pressing 1 or 2. - STAVE mode gives you a range of two octaves upwards from A below middle C. You enter notes by pressing the note name (a to g for the lower octave and A to G for the upper octave), prefaced by S for sharp, L for flat or N for natural. - KEYBOARD mode allows the top two rows of your Spectrum keyboard to simulate a keyboard instrument with 10 white notes and 7 black notes from middle C upwards. Fasten the overlay to your Spectrum keyboard to help you play. In either case the following commands are then available: 1 Notes on music If you select this option, you will then be offered a number of demonstrations as follows: 1 Note pitch 2 Note duration 3 Rests 4 Key signature 5 Time signature 6 Return to main menu 2 Create a tune If you want to write a tune, you must first tell the computer whether you want to include flats or sharps in the key signature and what time signature you want. Then you can enter your tune. Note that in KEYBOARD mode your Spectrum will automatically adjust the 'sign' of the note to the key signature. The screen will remind you which keys tell the computer: - that the next note is to be flat/sharp/natural to override the key signature for this note (STAVE mode only), - the note itself, - to insert a rest, - to delete the last note displayed. If no notes are left on the screen after the deletion, the previous three notes are redisplayed, - that the value of the next note (its length or duration) is to be shorter or longer than the last note. At the start of your tune, the note value is that of the time signature (eg. crotchet for common time). Changing this to, say, a minim causes all future notes to be minims until the next change, - to copy your TV screen display to your ZX Printer (if connected), - to end your tune. 3 Play a tune Your Spectrum will play your tune back at your chosen speed. If at any time you want to make changes to it, or if you want to add notes to the end of the tune, the computer will respond by displaying the last three notes it has played and you will automatically be taken to the "Amend a tune" function, described next. 4 Amend a tune You select this facility either by pressing 4 when the main menu is displayed, or by indicating that you want to amend your tune while you are listening to it (see above). Both the key and time signatures are retained, but you may alter notes in your tune at will. All the facilities of "Create a tune" are available to you, as well as the possibilities of: - tabbing through the original tune, copying notes to your new tune, - exiting, erasing any part of the original tune not yet referred to, - exiting, copying any remaining notes in the old tune across to the new tune. 5 Save a tune Use this to record your tune on to cassette tape; follow the instructions in your Spectrum handbook. Note that this records the data needed by your Spectrum to play your tune. Listening to the tape directly will not be particularly tuneful! 6 Load a tune This loads any tune you have previously saved using MUSICMASTER. 7 Stop Exit from program. 8 Switch to keyboard/stave mode This enables you to switch between STAVE mode and KEYBOARD mode whenever you wish. Additional hints Only one tune is retained in the computer at any time. If you enter mode 2 (Create a tune) or mode 6 (Load a tune), then any existing tune not already Saved (mode 5) is lost. Each tune has a limit of 1000 notes. A single note, which may be displayed as several notes if it spans a bar-line, counts as one note. Request for the next note to be sharp, flat or natural (other than when you are initially specifying the key signature) apply to the next note only, and not to the remainder of the bar. Requests for double sharps or flats are simply treated as single sharps or flats.