---------------------------- 3]MUSICAL TRIO REVIEWED -- Deluxe Music Construction -- Sonix -- Music Studio By BARRY SILVERSTEIN 1]---------------------------- Deluxe Music Construction Set by Geoff Brown. Distributed by Electronic Arts, 1820 Gateway Drive, San Mateo, Ca. 94404. Copy Protected. Retail $99.95. Sonix by Mark Riley. (Formally Musicraft). Distributed by Aegis Development, Inc., 2210 Wilshire Blvd. #277, Santa Monica, Ca. 90403. Not copy protected. Retail $79.95. The Music Studio by Ric Forrester, Greg Hospelhorn, Rick Parfitt and Peter Wickman of Audio Light Inc., Distributed by Activision, 2350 Bayshore Frontage Road, Mountain View, Ca. 94943. Copy protected. Retail $49.95. -------------- These programs are three of the major music sequencers currently available for the Amiga Computer. Each will allow you to place musical notes on a musical staff and play the score back, but the results and the ease of doing so are very different. They all contain MIDI support, but because I do not have a MIDI setup I will not comment on them. The first thing one judges a product by (whether rightfully so or not) is the package. Deluxe Music Construction Set (DMCS) comes in a sturdy cardboard box, Sonix comes in a not quite as sturdy box but still of decent quality, and The Music Studio (MS) comes in a small, flimsy, easily crushed cardboard package. The manual for DMCS is a wirebound 112-page book with an introduction, appendix, glossary and index. I used it mainly as leisure type reading because most of the operation of DMCS is easy to follow. I recommend you go through Chapter 3 (Reference) because it contains many useful tips. The Sonix manual is a glued 248-page manual that will not stay open easily. It includes not only information on running the program but an introduction to music and music theory. It also has a table of contents, several appendices, a glossary and an index. It is both informative and easy to read, but like DMCS the documentation becomes reference material as the program is relatively easy to use. The Music Studio manual is 78 pages long, stapled and the pages can be convinced to stay open. We "share" the space with the Atari ST people. This is a well written easily read manual that contains a table of contents, and a reference guide. There is no index but with some search the contents will serve that purpose. Also included is a quick reference card. Very useful as you are learning this program. Okay, now lets get down to the important part, the programs themselves. As I said, all three will allow you to put note and other symbols on a musical staff and play back the music, but all are not created equal. DMCS and MS support notes from whole to thirty-second. Sonix only supports to the sixteenth note. All three allow dotted rhythms except MS does not allow dotted rests. Triplets are not directly supported on Sonix. They can be closely imitated, but when printing out the score they will not print as triplets. With MS you cannot change keys or tempo within a composition, Sonix allows you to do so in an indirect manner and DMCS allows you to do it in a simple straightforward manner. So not as to be totally misleading, you can change the tempo within MS by raising or lowering the durations of the notes, but I consider this to crude and unacceptable for tempo changes. All three do support accidentals: sharps, flats and naturals. Sonix allows you change the volume of one track versus another but not within a track itself. All three support the four voices of the Amiga itself plus extra MIDI voices. Relative volume can be "faked" on MS and Sonix by changing the instruments themselves, which can be done on a note-for-note basis. DMCS lets you change the volume of notes or measures or sections from ppp to fff by placing those symbols directly on the screen. All three offer cut-and-paste type editors that work well. Sonix allows you to work on one track at a time by clicking off others. You may leave a track black where you can edit that track and play it at full volume. By clicking a track blue you may not edit it, but it can be seen for comparison with other tracks and will play at half volume. Click again and the track disappears and you cannot hear it at all. MS allows similar type of editing as Sonix. To place notes just click them where you want. The top note is voice 1, the second is voice 2 etc. If you do not want a voice sounding, you place the rests you need. Because MS allows you to use up to 15 different instruments on any chosen notes, the idea of different tracks is not limiting. You may edit one track at a time with the track option. DMCS is much more straightforward to use. Unlike the other two, which only use the grand staff, you may use up to eight different staves. Simply put the notes, rests and other symbols directly on the staff. Within the composition you may change from either the treble, bass, tenor or alto cleft at the beginning of any measure. As mentioned above you can change keys and tempo. The only limitation is that these must be done at the beginning of a measure. Sonix will let you to change the instrument at any note in any voice at any time. The limitation here is the amount of memory and available instruments. MS allows you to change any note instrument at any time with the limit of 15 different instruments. DMCS allows you to change the instrument only at the beginning of a measure. The other limitation is the amount of memory. DMCS provides for "beaming" notes, which can give it a very professional appearance. The other two do not. Because you are allowed up to eight staves in DMCS, the screen appearance and printed score are also much more professional looking. I find the MS screen confusing to regard at times. Placement of the accidentals and the colors of the notes can often make the screen look like a hodge-podge rather than a score. Sonix is less guilty of this, while DMCS is not guilty at all. All programs allow you to transpose music by steps and octaves, and all three allow you to click notes into place, but DMCS shines above the other two. With MS you must constantly go to the top or bottom menu, click either left or right button, slide the mouse down to your choice and then click the choice on the staff. There is a way of using the function keys but I found that method annoying to use. The point: Even though you can eventually learn to do this quickly, it gets tiring. Sonix uses the same idea except that all the symbols are showing on the screen and are more quickly placed. DMCS allows you to pick the symbol off the screen, or use a keyboard for placing of notes, or use the keyboard. I never found it in the manual, but by pressing w you get a whole note, h = half, q = quarter etc. Most every symbol can be gotten from the keyboard, a method I find much easier, quicker and less frustrating to use. If that is not enough, you can chose notes by the numbers: 1 = whole to 6 = thirty-second. Hold the shift and you get the corresponding rest. MS and DMCS support lyrics, Sonix does not. MS does so very easily, DMCS not so. DMCS also supports multiple fonts, guitar symbols and other music symbols such as D.C. al fine, octaves and the like. DMCS supports ties and slurs, MS supports ties but not slurs and Sonix supports neither; however what is surprising if you split a measure by changing time signature, Sonix will automatically split a note and tie it from measure to measure. You cannot tie notes yourself. Instrument sounds: Sonix and MS allow you to create your own instruments. Each has a built-in screen where you may create instruments of many varied sounds. I prefer the Sonix because it is easier to use (not that MS is difficult) and I believe you can get a more varied types of sound. I do not believe it is possible to get a true noise or percussion type sound with MS. If you listen to Jay's Song, which comes with Sonix, you will hear a good example of not only percussion but of great music. Unlike the other programs, Sonix supports both analog and digital instruments; a very strong feature indeed. You can take IFF instruments from DMCS and use them with your own creations. Sonix will also allow you to perform minor modifications on these IFF instruments. DMCS uses only digital instruments. You cannot create your own (through the program that is -- an audio digitizer and program like AudioMaster allows that) nor can you modify them. Both Sonix and MS contain other features that I think are of dubious value. I am sure others will disagree. Sonix has a keyboard feature that allows you to play anywhere from 1-4 notes at a time or even play along with a score. I have used this and actually enjoyed it, but I would have rather seen Aegis put in more musical features such as easily supporting change in key and time signatures, triplets and crescendo. MS has a Paintbox to place scores on the staff by using colored rectangles, each rectangle representing a different note value, depending the rectangle size. This might be useful for very young children, but if you are going to learn music, it would probably almost as easy to just learn the note values and use notes. I think both Sonix and MS could have been made better use of their programming skills by including more musical features instead. Sonix also does one other strange thing. When you play the score, that is all that happens. The screen does not scroll or turn pages. The biggest disadvantage to this is that you cannot "edit on the run." If you want to make a change you must stop the music and try to find the spot. DMCS and MS move the score in front of you so you can "see" where you might want a change. The best reason I can think of for Sonix not scrolling is to allow other things to happen while the music plays. I have performed disk accesses while playing music and not a hitch occurred. DMCS, by the way, allows you to make some changes on the run. You can change certain sound parameters while the score is playing and you will hear them immediately. While editing instruments in Sonix, despite the manual seems to indicate, not all changes can be undone. Some changes will remain permanent. Therefore, if you want to keep experimenting with changing the instrument, I suggest you save your creations along the way. Those of us with memory expansion will benefit when using DMCS and Sonix. I load these programs directly into ram:. With DMCS I then load the instruments into ram:Instruments and usually access only the score on disk, even though I have loaded scores into ram:Music. With both these programs, larger scores are possible. I have obtained the entire Pictures at an Exhibition on one DMCS score. MS allows fairly large scores as is. I have a Brandenburg Concerto which runs around nine minutes. All three programs are capable of truly good music. However, if I were forced to choose just one, I would have no doubt that I would take DMCS. I use this program over 90 percent of the time. It is a very professional looking and sounding music sequencer. Compare the scores that can be created with those of printed sheet music. It easily supports features like multiple and changing staves, changing time and key signatures, beaming, triplets, quintuplets, slurs, crescendo and decrescendo. This support puts it above the other two. The DMCS editing system is easier to use, mainly because of the multiple staves. I do not think DMCS is perfect: I would like glissando, some of the instruments have annoying pops, and I would like to be able to use analog instruments also. I can change the digital instruments because of AudioMaster from Aegis. My next choice would be Sonix because it supports analog and digital instruments and can share scores with DMCS within some limitations. It lacks musical features. MS, though not a bad program by any means, would be my last choice. The screen is sometimes very hard to read and while the analog instruments can be quite varied, there are no filters or true percussion sound available. I get the impression that MS is too much of a porting over from the C=64 version. At first it did not support IFF, but the public domain does now have a program for converting its scores back and forth. This program lacks the Amiga touch. It does not use a standard Amiga interface, and it does not have musical features. 3]END OF TEXT