| I suggest you get a Roland MPU-401, the Apple interface for it, and a Yamaha
DX7. The DX7 has a broad range of sounds, and you can have my software,
which will permit you to enter music from the Apple keyboard. It took me
a couple of days to enter the first 40 bars of Annies' Song from sheet music,
so the process is tedious, but not impossible.
If you also buy ORCA/M you can modify the program to make entering music
easier, by making it do things "your way".
John Sauter
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| Thanks for the info. I went back and looked, and it was your
response of all the instruments available in the DX-7 ROMs that caught
my eye. I also found an older note from you about it only being able
to produce one of these sounds at a time. If I understand correctly,
you overcame by recording each instrument separetly, and then playing
them all back together (all one one tape)? Is it difficult to do this
synchronization?
Mark
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| re: .2--I don't find it difficult. However, I have a multi-track recorder,
and the MPU-401 has "tape sync". Recently I have been using the Roland SBX-80
in place of the "tape sync" feature of the MPU-401. Using the SBX-80 lets
me divide songs in time as well as by instrument, in order to fit them into
memory.
John Sauter
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| I don't think I can do justice to the SBX-80 in a few lines, but I'll try.
First, the description: the SBX-80 is a "synchronization box". It sends
signals to all of the other equipment, to keep them synchronized. It sends
DIN and MIDI synch information, though I use only the latter. It has a 10,000
measure memory to hold the intervals between notes, and each interval can
be programmed. There are several ways of setting these intervals: pushing
a button in real time, letting the SBX-80 listen to a "click track", also
in real time, using the panel controls to specify beats per minute, and using
the panel controls to copy from one set of measures to another. You can
always use the panel controls to add or remove a beat, or change the time
of an interval.
The SBX-80 can dump its memory to the MIDI bus, and I have recently coerced
my software into doing the dump and load, and storing the information on
floppy disk. The SBX-80 can also dump and load to a track of audio tape,
but I don't use this feature.
Speaking of audio tape, the SBX-80 can record SMPTE signals on a track of your
multi-track recorder, and later synchronize to the SMPTE signals, using them as
the time base for counting the intervals you have programmed. This is good
for keeping separate tracks of your multi-track recorder synchronized, if
you must record them independently, as I must.
In order to record long songs, I must divide them by time as well as by
instrument, else they would not fit into memory. The SBX-80 has a feature
called "SMPTE offset" to make this possible. After I record track 8 of the
multi-track recorder with two hours of SMPTE signals, I have a time base.
This time base is self synchronizing, so if the SBX-80 starts listening in
the middle of the tape it needs only about a second to discover where it
is. If I set "SMPTE offset" to the place where I want the passage to start,
then put the Multi-track recorder in Record a couple of seconds before that
point, the SBX-80 will find the SMPTE code and, when the programmed moment
comes, send a MIDI START signal to the sequencer. Of course, this requires
that the track to be recorded have a couple of seconds of silence between
memory loads. It remains to be seen if this will be a burden. If it is
I can always alternate tracks.
The SBX-80 has some other features that make it convenient when "debugging"
music. You can set a measure number into it, and it will point the sequencer
to that measure. It also has manual controls for start, stop and continue.
It even can send a song number to the sequencer, but I haven't implemented
that in my Apple II.
For my limited needs the SBX-80 is overkill, but it was the only thing available
that would synchronize in the middle of a track, thus letting me divide songs
into memory loads by time as well as by instrument. Maybe someday I'll be
glad I got a SMPTE box with lots of features though; one thing I've learned
in this business is that the way to preserve your investment is to use standard
interfaces.
John Sauter
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