P A R T O N E - T H E B A S I C S
_________________________________________________________________________
I N T R O D U C T I O N
_______________________
MUSIC is not a game as such. It is a remarkably fully-featured 'Music and
Video Creator' - quite basic but also surprisingly powerful and lots of
fun to use. It has hundreds of sampled instruments, with snatches of
melody and vocal samples, and loads of ready-made demo tunes and beats.
In fact everything you need to mix up some sounds and stitch them
together to make your very own danceable tracks which, with just a bit of
effort and a lot of imagination, can be nearly as good as anything among
your CD collection. You can Save to a memory card and impress your Mum
and your mates and one day maybe even a record company. It's at your
fingertips with MUSIC in your PlayStation.
The interface seems daunting at first, but it is simple enough with some
thought and a little patience. There are enough features in there to
allow even a complete beginner to knock together a classy track, in just
about any style you can come up with, in no time at all. This FAQ is
simply a guide to that interface, with some tips and pointers to help you
make sense of it if you are having trouble getting started. It is pretty
basic information, put in terms as simply as I can, since I will assume
you are reading this mostly because you have little experience with any
kind of music program and can't make sense of this one. MUSIC for
Dummies? Well, I wish someone had taken the time to do something like
this for me when I started, because after months of trying things out,
I'm still learning. I really hope you will find all the information you
need to get in there and Boss this incredible music-making tool around so
you can just get on and start making music of your own.
I won't be telling you how to make a 'hit' (because if I could, I'd be
busy doing it), but maybe I can help you form a clearer idea of what it
is that you are trying to do, and organise your first attempts at music-
making so that you can find out if MUSIC is the tool to help you to do
it. Although you can't expect TOO much, this awesome program contains all
of the most useful basic features you will find in any of the
'professional' music sequencers. You will at the least gain so much
knowledge of how a track can be built up that you will soon know if you
have what it takes to make music, and if you find that you do then you
can confidently go on and try one of those.
Just have some fun - you are limited only by your own inspiration, and as
long as you are willing to devote a little time to get the best out of
MUSIC then you should have many, many hours of pleasure, and perhaps
along the way you'll work out that hit song that is in you.
Have you ever wanted to make your own music but felt you lacked the
ability (or patience) to learn an instrument? Perhaps you have some
ability but don't know where to begin to get your ideas down... you have
a head full of tunes and just listening to some of the stuff they play on
the radio you KNOW you can do so much better if only you had some idea of
how it was done. You even dream that one night in the club the DJ will
be putting YOUR Tuneful 12" on the decks and the joint will be rocking to
your very own bangin' beats! Fame, Riches and gorgeous Girls will surely
follow and... Well, let's not get carried away just yet.
I don't want to put a dampener on your ambition, but realistically, you
are NOT going to make a No.1 record using just this program. I'd love for
you to prove me wrong, perhaps by saying so on the back of a large
cheque, but... Face it, the records you hear on the radio or at that club
are almost always the result of dozens of professional people working
full-time in studios with tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds
worth of recording gear, and with proper musicians who have spent years
learning their craft. ALMOST always - there is still room for the
creative amateur and I daresay you could break through with a pair of
spoons and a lot of front if you have truly unmistakable talent. Most of
us don't, and I'm guessing that you are not sure yet but you always want
to learn, so that maybe one day soon you can join those studio guys and
share your talent with them. That's a good attitude, because even the
pro's had to start somewhere, and MUSIC is a great place for us to start.
You don't need those thousands of pounds worth of equipment, instruments
and recording gear to make music. You already have a PlayStation and now,
in MUSIC you have the perfect tool you need to work out your ideas. You
will spend some time at first just learning the interface so that you can
understand how things work. This is important, because before you can
make any meaningful music you need to have clear ideas and an organised
approach. It may seem boring, but you can take your time, and it is not
exactly like hard work. I reckon you will take it all in no problem, and
it will then seem like so much fun that someone will have to tell you to
stop...
Think what you are working towards - keep that 'Tune' in your head. You
will soon be able to: lay down some drums and a rhythm track; combine
different instruments and sounds; add in some simple vocals and structure
all those pieces into at least one coherent and (hopefully) tuneful track
of which you can be proud.
R . E . S . P . E . C . T .
___________________________
All credit to Jester Interactive and Codemasters for doing something
truly revolutionary with this fabulous program. The game (I'll have to
call it that) came out in the UK in November 1998, to rave notices from
just about everyone - all the PlayStation magazine journalists, readers
and reviewers, many, many top musicians and not least around 360,000+
satisfied customers. Surely all of them were intrigued by its quirky
little interface and then found to their astonishment that ANYONE really
can create surprisingly sophisticated danceable music after just a couple
of hours. The excitement at that time was partly because it was (and
still is) very different from anything else on the PlayStation. Parappa
the Rapper was a very funny 'music-based' game and Fluid was an amusing
diversion where you could mix up and create your own tunes from ready-
made samples, but they were still just games. MUSIC has much more in
common with a computer program, and if you have any experience of
'proper' music software such as Cubase or Logic Audio, then you will be
astonished at how fully-featured this one is. I stress that it isn't a
top-line piece of kit; it's not pretty to look at and there are severe
restrictions on the Memory front, but it does what it does very well.
Even though there are half a hundred Samplers, Sequencers and Music
Editors at every price and with every feature imaginable, they require
the power and expense of a desktop PC. MUSIC has the major advantage that
it costs next to nothing and it runs on your PlayStation.
I don't know what it says about musicians, but Jester have included not
one but TWO manuals in the box...
There is a comprehensive manual as you would expect, which tells you
everything you need to know, and there is also a 'Quick Start Guide'
which tells you everything you need to know but very, very simply. (I'm
not making any jokes about Drummers.)
Well, that's understandable. I suppose it IS a bit confusing at first.
You can start in and use those manuals right now, and in truth you don't
need much more than what is in there to get started, but there is also a
lot of potentially confusing information in there that you DON'T need
just yet. Take this tutorial instead and you will learn all the important
bits without even trying.
What we are going to do is look at the interface (what they call the MAIN
CONSOLE) in simple and logical steps to introduce all its components
gradually, so that you can master them instead of possibly becoming
confused by trying to make music straight away without fully
understanding what is going on. To make this even simpler, we are going
to forget entirely about the Video Creation features of the 'game'. Now
that is disappointing in a way, because those parts are certainly
intriguing, but it is just too much to take in right now. All we want to
do is get down to actually making MUSIC!
W H A T ' S G O I N ' O N ?
_____________________________
I really have no idea of who did the Lion's share in bringing this game
to the public, but take a moment to appreciate the 'Bouncing Hula-Hoops'
logo of the publisher Codemasters - that is your guarantee of quality, so
look for it on games elsewhere. Similarly with Jester Interactive, the
developers. They Know. Even the Loading screen isn't as irritating as on
most games, because we get to watch an animated DJ manically spinning a
platter.
Of course you will select 'English' and then we are at the Main Menu:
start
load and save
cd player
options
X select
We'll be using just 'start' and 'load and save' in this tutorial.
[Unsurprisingly, 'cd player' lets you put any music CD in the PlayStation
- and then there IS a nice surprise, as you get an automatically
generated lightshow to accompany it. We don't need any of that just yet,
and likewise you can just read the manual for an explanation of all the
'options'.]
If you touch nothing for a minute, a demo will load up and you will get a
random selection from several complete tracks which are included on the
disc to give you an idea of what your new best friend can do. Some of the
videos are fascinating (depending on your, er, state of mind), and so you
might like to look at the pretty patterns whilst listening to some of the
tracks. This is actually a good way to take an objective view on how they
sound. They are all made using just the instrument samples on the disc,
so just think - if THEY can, YOU can! No doubt you will like some of them
and dislike others, but that is fine because you will soon be able to dig
around and CHANGE the bits you hate and LEARN from the bits you love!
After you have heard a couple of demos, press any button and you are back
at the Main Menu.
For the purpose of this tutorial, I have to ask you to keep your natural
enthusiasm in check for the moment. To get the very most out of this
fabulous game, it really does pay dividends to invest a little time to
learning just how everything works. That means we are not going to be
making music any time soon, but once you understand every menu item, it
will be much easier and a lot more fun when you do.
If you press X to 'start' then you are confronted with a mostly blue and
black screen comprised of grids and numbers in boxes. This is the MAIN
CONSOLE. It looks very confusing, and there doesn't seem to be much to
do. When you have mastered this interface, you will dive straight in
here, so that is why it is first on the list at the Main Menu. For now,
don't press any buttons but take a good look at the screen. It will
become like your second home from now on.
fig.1 - THE MAIN CONSOLE [Best viewed in Courier New]
________________
___ _______
~' \ ,=========================================-~ | VIDEO |
/ 1 ) I||||||||||||l | | | l | | | l | |) |/MUSIC?|
( < |>-----------+-----------+-----------+-----<| |_______|
> 2 ) I||||||||||||l | | | l | | | l | |) _______
( < |>-----------+-----------+-----------+-----<| |counter|
> 3 ) I||||| This window is the TRACK EDITOR | |) |_O_O_1_|
( < |>-----------+-----------+-----------+-----<| _______
> 4 ) I||||||||||||l | | | l | | | l | |) |=======|
( < |>-----------+-----------+-----------+-----<| |MEMORY?|
> 5 ) I||||||||||||l | | | l | | | l | |) |_______|
( < |>-----------+-----------+-----------+-----<| .--.
> 6 ) I||||||||||||I_ | | | l_ | | | l_ | |) (BPM?)
\.____,~' '-========================================-' '~~'
__________________________________________
| Here you see ON-SCREEN BUTTON 'HELP' |
_______________________ ______________________ (That)
/||||||||||||||||||||||||\ ,Y|||||||||||||||||||||||\ gr-0_0-vy
1||||||||||||||||||||||||1 l|||...and so is this |||| ('MUSIC' logo)
1||||||||||||||||||||||||l 1||||||||||||||||||||||||; (is HERE!)
1|||| This is BLANK ||||1 >======================x
1|||| (for now) ||||l 1||||||||||||||||||||||||Y ok8Y8bk
1||||||||||||||||||||||||l 1 || || || || || || | 88VF888Pd/
1||||||||||||||||||||||||1 l || || || || || || | (88MK8HM/e|
1||||||||||||||||||||||||1 l========================| |g8oM888";
1||||||||||||||||||||||||1 |12345678910111213141516 | ^>TY"'
\||||||||||||||||||||||/ \oooooooooooooooooooooo/
['MODE' BALL]
Looking at your tv screen, and using fig. 1 as a reference, take a close
look at that interface. It is comprised of 12 distinct elements, and we
will be looking at each one, but in no particular order because not all
of them are useful to us just now. Reading from top left clockwise (they
aren't numbered in fig.1 but you can see easily enough which is which),
these elements are:
i) The curvy window down the left simply shows us which 'row' we are
on. There are sixteen horizontal rows (called CHANNELS) and at the moment
you can see six of them, which is why there are the numbers 1-6 in this
window. The number '1' is lit up, since that is the Channel we are on at
the moment, before we start moving around. (You'll soon get a clearer
idea of this)
ii) The biggest window is called the TRACK EDITOR, which is a good
thing because it is where you will 'Edit' your 'Tracks'
iii) The tiny box at top right simply shows: are we in VIDEO mode? / are
we in MUSIC mode? At the moment we are in Music mode because there is a
musical symbol showing. This is good. We are not going to use Video mode
AT ALL
iv) TIMER (hour:minute:second) and underneath is a similar COUNTER
v) The coloured horizontal bars show: how much MEMORY are we using?
How much is available? (None at the moment. Never enough.)
vi) A green indicator - which will flash in time when our song is
playing to show us the 'BPM' (Beats Per Minute)
vii) A friendly DJ. He doesn't do anything but keep us company
viii) A 3D rotating 'MODE BALL' (at least it WILL rotate later). It just
shows us the mode we are in. -Huh? - Later, I promise
ix) [Upper window] Later on, you will summon menus which pop up here,
and they also sometimes take over the window underneath as well
x) [Lower window] At the moment, this is displaying information about
the status of the 'Channels' mentioned in the bit about the first window.
These are indicated by those little numbers from 1 to 16
xii) The last window at lower left is BLANK for now, but it is usually
where Video images can be seen. Later it will contain lots of powerful
tools for making our songs sound even better
xii) ...and there in the centre is the self-explanatory HELP menu
If you keep these elements separate in your mind, then you will not be
overloaded with information and you can concentrate on your music. Just
about all the windows and boxes are useful, but not at the same time.
S E E W H A T Y O U H E A R
______________________________
The main 'grid' across most of the top section is the Track Editor, which
is where all the action is going to be.
You can imagine your song written out on a very long sheet of paper like
a roll of wallpaper, and the grid is a window through which there is just
a small part of it that you can see. As your song is playing, the long
sheet of paper scrolls past this window so you can now SEE each part of
the song you are hearing as it is played.
So how long is this sheet of 'paper' (in other words - how long is the
song written on it)? It can be any length you like, within sensible
constraints. It could be just a few seconds (a radio jingle for example)
or a ten minute Club Anthem. Most songs are about 3-5 minutes, because
that is about the right length before even a good tune becomes over-
familiar to our busy minds (in other words: Repetitive = Boring). On this
one, stick with convention.
Examine the grid. It seems to be made up of blue 'blocks' stacked up like
bricks. If the screen is red and not blue, you have probably accidentally
touched L2, as this would mean that you are about to edit Video and not
Music. That is maybe a subject for another tutorial, but we are going to
ignore the Video features for now. Tap L2 on and off a couple of times
anyway to see the blocks switch from blue to red, and notice the little
musical note in the box at top right flip over to become a theatrical
lightbulb to match the ones now beside the numbers in the vertical window
down the left. That is all that little box does, so from now on you can
safely ignore it.
If the screen goes completely black (but you can still see a little DJ at
lower right) at any time, then you have accidentally switched R2 and gone
into full-screen Video mode. Flick R2 a couple of times to check on this.
When you have the Main Console switched so that the blocks are blue and
the numbers each have a musical note symbol, take a close look at the
Track Editor window again.
The area to the left is blacked out so it is quite hard to make out, but
now that you look closer you can see that even the blacked-out area is
made up of blocks. If you count from the top left, the grid is six blocks
deep and fourteen across, with the first four vertical rows being the
blacked-out ones. The shading of the blue blocks make them look a bit
like columns of pennies viewed in close-up from the side. The vertical
black stripes are thinner than the horizontal ones, so really it looks
like the blocks are in rows, and there are six of them. Six..? Like the
numbers 1-6 down the left side? You should certainly expect so; six rows,
each of which is four across (the black ones), then it looks like another
set of four and then another set of four and then just two...
Well this is just a way to make it easier for you to distinguish one
sequence of blocks from another; they seem to be in sets of four, because
there are usually 'four beats to a bar'. A bar is a short 'chunk' of
music that forms a natural little section of a song. There is really no
separation between the blocks other than this visual one, and the idea is
to 'fill' these blocks with little bits of music to make one continuous
track.
You will therefore find it convenient to be organising your Tune into
sets of four 'blocks' of any sound you want, each of which contains four
'beats' so a block can be thought of as one 'bar' of music. (Sorry to get
all technical there.) It's easy enough to imagine the way it works: you
have heard a million songs where someone goes "1-2-3-4" and everyone
starts to play at the speed of the counting. You can go through just
about any song going "1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4" in your head and notice then how
key parts of the song - a new verse or the chorus or an instrumental solo
etc. - seem to occur just as you go "One..." to begin another bar. In
most styles of music, that is just a natural rhythm. Don't worry too much
if you have only a little musical knowledge - MUSIC is quite intuitive,
so you can just play it the way you feel it.
R O C K A R O U N D T H E B L O C K
______________________________________
You will notice that there are green 'crosshairs' over the grid, glowing
soothingly, and notice too that the centres of these crosshairs cover
exactly one block. Think of the crosshairs as containing a 'cursor' able
to highlight just one block at a time. Using this cursor to target any
block you choose, you will soon be placing into some of them a little
piece of music or sound - an instrument playing just a single note or a
part of a tune, a drum roll or cymbal crash, snatches of vocals or any
other sound you want at that place in your song. The blocks fit together
so that you will hear one long flow of music, and soon you won't be
thinking of them as individual blocks at all, but just part of the
overall sound. The little blocks are just a neat way to contain a small
part of your song, to help you work on it bit by bit until you have
created the whole thing.
When a block is filled with music, the creators of this game call these
blocks 'Riffs' which is quite suitable, as that is apparently the usual
musicians term for a small component of any song when played on its own.
Each block is able to contain just a few seconds of sound, but that is
the perfect length for one 'bar' of music anyway.
The cursor shows you which Riff in the grid is targeted, meaning that is
the one you can edit at any particular time. You only need one at a time
of course, because you only have one pair of hands:) There is a huge
library of ready-made riffs on the disc to get you started, and you can
simply fit them together like a chain. Your song will most likely be made
up of hundreds of riffs, but you will soon see that editing several riffs
together at once is a standard technique, so don't worry that you may
have too many to cope with.
At the moment there is no song loaded and therefore no riffs, and all the
blocks are empty - there is no sound waiting to be played as the cursor
passes over - but you can see and hopefully understand the method you
will be using to make music soon enough. You can scroll the crosshairs
around to highlight any block you like.
Try it now, first by just moving the D-pad RIGHT button. There are a LOT
more than fourteen blocks on that roll of paper scrolling past your
window - an endless stream of blue whizzes past. Straight away you will
notice the white numbers in the little box to the right start counting
up.
I'M C O U N T I N G O N Y O U
________________________________
There are two sets of numbers: the little ones on top represent a clock
counting in minutes and seconds how far 'along' your Tune you have
scrolled (and when those blocks contain riffs of music, then how much of
your song has been played), and this is in sync with the lower, larger
sized numbers which show the same thing but in terms of how many blocks
along from the beginning you have scrolled. Stop and tap Left and Right
to confirm this. These numbers are shown a little larger because when you
are composing it is more important to you to know which block you are at
than how long your song has been playing when you scroll to any
particular point.
Common sense will tell you that your Tune should be not be much more than
about 4 or 5 minutes long (to avoid boring everyone to death if nothing
else), and it may be better to aim for three minutes which was
established many years ago as the perfect duration for pop records - and
Radio play! This means that your song should be from around 80-180 blocks
long depending on how fast it is to be played. In the present case, if
you scroll to the right until the clock reads five minutes (0 05 00),
then the larger number should read 164. That is quite a lot of blocks to
fill with sound, so you should be satisfied with that.
If you are wondering just how long you CAN make a track, then keep
scrolling to the right: scrollin', scrollin', scrollin', scrollin' ON!
Keep scrollin'... until you reach the very end of the 'roll of paper'.
999 blocks, right? The clock in this case reads '0 30 40' which is just
over half an hour, and only just under half a CD! Unless you are thinking
of doing a tribute to Spinal Tap's "Jazz Odyssey", that is more than you
will ever need for any individual song, but it is nice to know you COULD
compose one that long if you wanted to. (In fact the theoretical maximum
you could manage is 1 hour 41 minutes if the song was played very slowly,
but I doubt anyone would want to listen to all of it!)
Now scroll all the way back using D-pad Left until the block counter
reads 001 again. Maybe pause a couple of times along the way, just to be
sure you understand how those counters are working together. If you are
sure you've got it, then there is no need to scroll all that way back -
press 'START' and then hold it as you press and release 'DOWN'. Presto!
Back to the very first block.
Notice that the counter reads 001, so you definitely ARE back to square
one, yet there are still those blacked-out blocks to your left!? They are
obviously there just to give you a visual clue that you are at the very
beginning - and there is a very long way to go before you reach the end,
as you have just seen!
I see you are looking a little unhappy. All we have done so far is zip
around a blank screen and there is no sign of any music. And this block
thing isn't making much sense either...
W E'R E G O N N A G E T L O A D E D
______________________________________
...and have a Good Time. Take a quick glance to see that the Counter is
at 001.
1) Press SELECT + START to return to the Main Menu - you can do this at
any time anywhere.
2) Highlight 'load and save' by pressing DOWN once. Press X.
- I find this Menu to be the opposite of intuitive! This is where you go
to Save your songs to a memory card. We'll take a proper look a bit
later. For now it's just In and Out.
3) The Yellow box is flashing - Press UP.
4) The CD icon is flashing - Press X.
5) After a short pause the Yellow box is flashing again - Press X.
6) Small white boxes with icons have appeared and the one at top left is
flashing. Using JUST the D-pad, move to the little green arrow at bottom
right of that window [Down x4] until it flashes. Press X.
7) Don't move. Press X.
8) Now there are just 7 little white box icons. Using JUST the D-pad
move up to the top left again [Up x2 then L x2] and you see "Disco" under
'name' at the top right of the screen. Press X TWICE.
9) After a short while the Yellow box is flashing again. Press TRIANGLE.
10) Back at the Main Menu - Press UP to highlight 'start' and then X.
Ta-dah! Our boring blue window is nearly filled with little pictures of
fairy cakes. Since you are in a button-bashing mood, press START.
I G O T T H E M U S I C I N M E
____________________________________
Yeah, I know - horrible isn't it? We'll sort it out a bit later, but
there are a few things going on that should divert your attention. The
colourful musical icons (they aren't cakes at all - I was just messing
with you) each represent a small section of all the sounds that you hear.
You can see that the Green crosshairs turn to Blue as they sweep steadily
across the blocks, now filled with icons. As they hit each block, across
the whole width of the window, they trigger all of the sounds in them in
sequence, one after the other seamlessly until they reach the end.
Now that the music has stopped, take another good look at the Track
Editor window.
You can see very clearly that the icons appear to be in rows. The game
designers have thoughtfully made various icons which represent the type
of sound of the riff on which they appear. If you look a bit closer you
can see that rows 1 and 6 have the identical icon, which is five piano
keys. This can denote various musical styles, and in this case it is the
bassline and that delightful melody, each played on a synth. Row two is
clearly a kick drum (with a pedal) and row 3 is a snare drum. Row 4 is
obviously a hi-hat which leaves row 5, which appears to be a kilt and
sporran... Anyway, you will get used to seeing these icons and others,
and they become very useful in quickly identifying certain styles of
riff. You can place any type of music on any of the rows, and all mixed
up if you want to, but take a leaf out of this composer's book and keep
everything neat like this. There is no reason not to.
You might not have noticed that there are little 'wedges' of light at the
foot of the window to mark the places where each new 'set' of four blocks
begin. This is just to help you keep things organised should the screen
become too full of music icons and you can't see the blue blocks and
their helpful shading. Remember that most styles of music are well suited
to a rhythmic '1-2-3-4 / 1-2-3-4' structure.
Hold START and flick DOWN to return to 001 and press Start again. Take a
look at everything that is happening on the screen as the music plays.
That little green indicator is flashing away and you will remember from
reading the introduction to the interface that this is in time to the
Beats Per Minute. Thankfully there is not a whole minute of this tune.
Along the bottom above the numbers, there are little dancing LED's -
you've probably seen something similar on a hi-fi, so you are correct if
you are thinking that these are 'levels'. You have just been
investigating the Counter, so of course you will notice that it is
ticking up nicely. It stops on 009, and the clock above it reads '0 00
16' - eight blocks of music played in sixteen seconds. It just seemed
longer.
Grit your teeth and scroll back to the beginning once again (or hold
START and flick DOWN like before). Press Start once more. This time just
watch that lower window with the LED's. How many are 'on'? Not too
difficult - the first six out of a possible 16 are leaping in time with
the music.
Scroll back to 001. Take a look at those numbers down the top left edge
in their own little curvy window, each alongside a musical symbol. Use
the D-pad DOWN to scroll the cursor towards the bottom. You will notice
that only the first six rows that were on-screen are filled with coloured
icons - and six just 'happened' to be the number of channels shown by the
LED's..! It is now making sense I hope. The lower part of the screen
after the number 7 is blank, like all the rest of the roll of wallpaper
off to the right after block 008.
See the numbers light up in a little spotlight as the cursor passes over
each row? You will notice that they only read from 1 to 6 at the start
but there are 16 altogether, and then there is the very bottom row which
is green. We'll get to that soon. It seems an unusual number, so why are
there sixteen rows? Why not ten, or two million? I'm assuming that you
have no practical experience of a recording studio, so excuse me for
being simplistic if you do...
Your song will be 'constructed' using as many of the 16 available rows of
blocks as you like. These rows extend along the timeline you just
investigated, and you can fill any of these blocks with any sound or
instrument you can find on the MUSIC disc. As the cursor travels along
that row it will play whatever is contained in any of the blocks which
are active. These rows are stacked one on top of the other in the Track
Editor window, so you can see that any or all or none of these 16 blocks
can play simultaneously. Think of the cursor as a train travelling along
a rigid 'track'. The blocks can be the spaces between the sleepers. There
are 16 'tracks' of these blocks running tight alongside each other, and
as the crosshairs (extending right across all 16 tracks) pass over each
block, they will play whatever sound or piece of music is contained in
each one of them at the very same time. You therefore have 16 'tracks'
available to use as far as you like along the timeline and fill with
whatever drum beats, instruments and vocal elements you can find, all to
be heard at the same time just like a real band playing. Sixteen might
not seem very many, but in fact it is really too many - if you intend to
cram your Tunes with sound all the way through then you will very quickly
end up with an unlistenable cacophony. Phil Spector knew exactly what he
was doing, and I'm thinking maybe you don't just yet.
In practice, you'll probably need to use only around six to ten of these
'tracks' for the bulk of all your tunes. A bonus in keeping the number of
sounds to the minimum is that not only will your music sound better, but
there will be less memory required to put it on your Memory card! (In
normal use, you will be able to fit at least a dozen songs on a card.)
Remember that sometimes "Less is More".
Each part of your song - drums, every instrument, vocals and any sound
effects - should be allocated separate tracks, which are also known as
'CHANNELS'. For one thing, this approach will make it easier for you to
keep track of what elements you have as you build them up.
So what is the concept of using 'Channels'? Imagine a recording studio,
and a band is recording. If they all start to play at once, just as if it
were a live performance in front of their fans, then all the sounds will
have to be recorded together and that is effectively just one 'channel'
of a recording. If any instrument is too loud or plays a wrong note
(which almost never happens of course ahem), that sound cannot be re-
recorded because there is no way to separate it from the other sounds in
the channel. For this reason, when 'laying down tracks' each player
almost always records his own part separately on a dedicated channel,
perhaps listening to the parts the others have already laid down on the
tape through headphones to be sure he is in sync. Typically this means
one channel is recorded for each of the guitars and one for the vocals,
several for the drums and one each for any keyboards or other
instruments, and still others for backing vocals and sound effects and
all the other samples and sounds that need to be dubbed on top. Since it
is quite normal to allocate separate tracks to each drum (to allow for
mixing the sound levels), and even to all the different cymbals, you can
imagine that in a pro studio the number of tracks available can fill up
pretty quickly.
In the days of black and white movies, a recording would have been taken
of even a vast orchestra in just one go. When it became possible to
record onto magnetic tape, at first one then two and soon four tracks
were used, which gave a degree of flexibility as the band could record
their instruments on one track and the vocals on another, and the drums
could be recorded separately also. This allowed for re-recording of any
of these elements without losing the good parts already taped. (In a
similar way, with MUSIC you can start to 'layer' your Tune with all the
separate elements, and change or remove any of these without affecting
any of the others.) As recording technology improved, it became quite
the thing to record using eight tracks and then sixteen and today it is
nothing unusual to have 32-track recording or even 64. It should stop
there because even Pink Floyd would be pushed to expect 128 sounds
simultaneously. 'Sergeant Pepper' was recorded using dozens of overdubs
on just a simple 4-track, so sixteen is enough for us I think.
Look again at the Track Editor window and see where you left the cursor
at the far left bottom row. Instead of one of the numbers 1-16 down the
rest of the left side, this row is headed by an icon of an Orchestra
Conductor's hand holding a baton. This is the BPM channel which stands
for Beats Per Minute, which is a literal way to express the 'Tempo' (It's
a musical term meaning Speed, Chris. "That's the right answer! You've
just won 500 pounds!"). The BPM channel simply shows you how quickly your
Tune is being played. You can see that the demo we loaded has a tempo of
115 bpm.
Most of what can be called 'Dance' music is recorded at a fast tempo
(typically 120-130 bpm) because that makes the rhythm sound 'urgent' and
exciting, which hopefully makes you want to move your body at the same
speed, (it still has to be a good tune though) and the reason it is
enjoyable may be partly because 120+ bpm is the typical heart rate of an
excited person! In recent years it has been the trend for various types
of Dance music such as Jungle and Drum 'n' Bass to go as high as 150 bpm,
which makes you so breathless that it is bordering on intolerable unless
you are on one or Mad for it... Conversely, other types of music such as
Trip Hop or Trance can slow down to only about 80 bpm for a Chilled Out
vibe. The tempo is a crucial factor in giving your songs their own mood,
so even if you know all this, you should always be ready to experiment.
You set the BPM with the R1 button. ONLY when the cursor is on that green
row, press R1 and a new window will open in the part of the Main Console
that says "Fever 1", and you know what this window relates to because
there is the 'Conductor's Baton' icon again. The number '115' is flashing
since you already noticed that was the tempo of the demo you just loaded.
Flick the R1 button on and off to get used to bringing up the BPM Editor.
Try changing the BPM for the demo that is loaded - you can't damage it by
messing about with it. (Unfortunately.) Make sure the cursor is in the
green BPM channel and the block Counter reads 001, and press R1. When the
BPM Editor appears again use UP to make the BPM 230. Hopefully this will
make the tune go twice as quickly. Press R1 again to close the BPM Editor
and press Start to find out...
Hey! That's not bad. It has a sort of Cajun feel don't you think? Well
done, anyway - you have successfully carried out an Edit for the first
time. Hold Start and flick DOWN to return to 001 and use R1 to summon the
BPM window once more and now use DOWN to set it to a little over half
speed - just 60 bpm - and Play It Again, Man. (If it still plays fast,
then you probably forgot to return to the beginning before setting the
BPM.)
This slowed-down version has a very different feel - you can imagine Bo
Derek bouncing across the beach in slow motion to this one... Of course
neither of these variations are particularly good as they are, but you
can see how something as simple as adjusting the BPM can affect the whole
'feeling' of your songs. This is going to be fun! Put the BPM back to 115
again for now.
[For future reference, the default is set at 130 bpm - that is what you
get with a new blank Track Editor window.]
In case you can't get a sense of quite how fast any desired BPM setting
is, remember that the green indicator to the right of the Track Editor
window will be flashing at the selected tempo when you try your song out.
Try clicking your fingers or tapping your toe to match this pulsing
metronome and you'll 'feel' the tempo you want. Simply move the D-pad UP
or DOWN to increase or decrease the BPM. You can go down as low as 40
bpm, which is so slow you're nearly asleep, and theoretically right up to
999 bpm which sounds exciting but results in just noise. In practice,
anything very much over 150 bpm is headache-inducing and can make your
track sound like it is a Pinky and Perky cover. It might be good for
making Cartoon soundtracks or crazy Videogame theme tunes though...
Anyway, perhaps it is best to stick within conventional BPM limits until
you know what you are doing. Just remember that whenever you change the
tempo, make sure the cursor is over the very first green block - the
counter will read 001 - so that the whole song will be played to that
beat.
So why is there a whole separate channel for the BPM? Surely it only
needs to be set once for each song... Well, this way it is possible to
change the BPM at any number of different points in the song (and if I
remember, L'il Louie for one did this very effectively a few years ago),
but that is a rare tool in the songwriters armoury, and for a good
reason: keep recklessly changing the tempo of your Tune, simply because
you can, and it becomes difficult to dance to and maybe annoying just to
listen to. There is no point in challenging your audience too much
without a good reason at this early stage, so once again steer clear of
the gimmicks and stick with the tried and true.
C H A N N E L H O P P I N G
____________________________
After you have used R1 to close the BPM Editor menu, move the cursor up
off the bottom row a little and press CIRCLE. Just tap your thumb on and
off the circle button a couple of times. What can you see? There is a
clicking sound as that strange little 3D ball spins back and forth. Also
one of the numbers alongside it started flashing. Hold CIRCLE down for a
moment. Which number is flashing, and what row did your cursor stop on?
A-ha! That's right - the number flashing is the same as the number with a
music note next to it, which is of course highlighted because that row
contains the cursor somewhere along its length. As you might expect, the
little number is flashing so that you can be sure you are about to do
something with just that channel and no other. (But not just yet.)
Let go of the circle button and move the cursor back to the bottom row
and then press circle again. Nothing happens; not even the ball spins.
Move it up a row and try it again, just to make sure it isn't broken...
OK, you have learned a vital mechanism in the way MUSIC does things. The
circle button had no effect when you were on the BPM channel because
there was no function it could perform - the few things you can do when
BPM is active are taken care of by other buttons. There are only so many
buttons on your PlayStation controller, and many, many features in MUSIC,
so all the major song editing tools are gathered into 'Modes' depending
on what you might be trying to do. That way the same buttons can produce
different results depending on which 'Mode' you are in. Ingenious!
You may already have had the frustrating experience of pressing buttons
and seeing unwanted consoles pop up and not being able to get rid of them
and you just want to get back to where you were, but strange things keep
happening and - Oh no! Now it has been deleted...
Don't panic. Possibly without noticing it, you may have 'switched' menus.
You would think you are about to do one thing but MUSIC thinks it has
been told to do another. Pay close attention to the on-screen Help menu
before you try something new, until you know exactly what you are doing.
Slip the cursor back over the green-coloured BPM channel again and look
at your scrolling on-screen Help menu. Notice one of the commands says
"R1 edit bpm", which you have already just done. Now move the cursor up a
row or two once more and look at the Help menu now. It looks pretty
similar, but straight away you can see that R1 is now the button to press
for something called 'riff editor'. (Hold on, Tiger - don't press it just
yet.) This is an example of menu switching. You don't have to do anything
special; MUSIC will anticipate what you are trying to do by offering you
a suitable Help menu wherever your cursor goes or whichever items you are
scrolling through. A quick glance at this menu will tell you whether you
are even in the right mode...
-Whoa! The who and the what now? You mentioned that 'mode' thing before,
and I didn't get it but I didn't like to say anything.
You should have asked - I'm trying to help! Let's see...
In the 'Channel Hopping' example above, simply holding down the circle
button switched to a completely different Mode as you easily noticed
because the 3D 'Mode Ball' turned around. You will remember that a
similar thing happened when you pressed L2 and the little 'Music or
Video?' indicator at top right flipped over. That has a box all to itself
because that is quite an important difference, but some of the modes we
are going to look at are related to each other closely enough that they
can share that spinning ball to save on screen Real Estate.
Earlier you learned that it is a good idea to pay close attention to the
on-screen Help menu so that you can always be confident that each button
will do what you expect. You can also confirm that you are in the right
mode first with a glance at the Mode Ball.
Check your Counter is at 001 and press START. This time you can distract
yourself from that annoying ditty by looking at the Mode Ball. You may
not have noticed with everything else that was going on, but now you see
that it flipped down to show a Dark Blue face with a triangle icon. That
should be familiar to you since it is the widely recognised 'Play'
symbol, just like on your video and cassette player. This is appropriate
then, as it indicates that we are in 'PLAY MODE'. Rewind to the beginning
once more and after using it to begin playback yet again, press START a
couple of times while the tune is running to pause the playback and see
the modes switch. Notice from the Help menu that as you would expect -
and as with BPM editing - there are very few options in Play Mode. When
you reach the end of the demo, the Start button no longer has an effect
(there is nothing left to play back) and so Play Mode is no longer
available. Scroll to 001 and do it again to be sure you have got it.
Have another look at that Mode Ball. If you look closely, you will notice
that the Red face of the ball has an identical icon to the one for the
BPM channel, only a different colour. It is a Conductor's hand holding a
baton. This just indicates that we are in what is called 'TRACK MODE'.
Think of yourself as if in a rehearsal studio, gathering together all the
musicians and instruments you need to make your song, and telling them
all what sound you want, and you are just having fun trying out lots of
different stuff and starting to lay down some 'Tracks'. While you are
preparing all these bits and pieces, the Conductor is there patiently
waiting while you work things out, until the performance is finally ready
to begin.
A little while ago you held CIRCLE to discover that it caused you to
switch to a different mode. This mode has to do with turning SOUND on and
off, which is known of course as 'muting', and so it is called 'MUTE
MODE'. That is why this mode has a little picture of a music speaker -
hold down circle once again and it is right there on the Light Blue face
of the Mode Ball. The speaker is about to become 'Mute'.
D I D H E S A Y 'M O O T'? W H A T'S A M O O T ?
______________________________________________________
Let's see what we can do with those green Channel buttons in the bottom
right window. HOLD the Circle button on your controller to enter Mute
Mode and move the D-pad Left and Right. This has the strange effect of
still moving the cursor in an 'up and down' direction through the rows 1-
16, and this is because you are now controlling its position by scrolling
through the corresponding numbers in the Mute Mode window. As the cursor
causes the numbers with the music notes to light up, the numbers in this
window flash at the same time. The Mute Mode window will be active for as
long as you hold down CIRCLE.
Stop on any number you like and - still keeping your thumb on the Circle
button - press UP on the D-pad once. What happened? Hard to miss unless
you are colour blind - your chosen track number now has a RED button
underneath it. Red - like the Video Console we switched over to by using
L2 a little while ago...is there a theme here? You got it - that little
red button means that this track is now dedicated to showing only Video
clips when the cursor runs over it; or at least it would be if we were
going to load any clips. Video can be loaded into blocks just like sound
can, and the 'Chases' appear on the red screen we checked out earlier
with the L2 button. (If you press it now you can confirm that there is no
Video loaded in any of the blocks in the Video Console.)
Still holding CIRCLE, move along to another number and press UP again,
and now you expect the red button to appear, which it does, so press UP
once more and what do you get now? Blue - like our friendly Main Console
when it is in 'Music' mode... So of course now that particular channel is
dedicated to playing back only Music, and if there are any Video blocks
along that tracks' timeline in the corresponding Video Console, they will
be ignored. We don't have to do this in this tutorial, but it doesn't
hurt to understand the concept now.
Have another go at switching one of the channels from Green to Red to
Blue and then throw caution to the wind and press UP one more time. Oh
no! The bulb has blown... I'm joking, of course. Now the channel
indicator is Black because it is switched OFF, which means that when you
come to play a song where several of the channels are fully loaded, you
can 'mute' one or more tracks completely by switching it off. (That must
be why this is called the 'Mute Mode', huh?) To save you risking
PlayStation Thumb, you can press CIRCLE and DOWN to cycle straight to
'Off' if that is the option you want. You can imagine that there will be
times when you might want to listen to just the keyboard and drums
without the guitar and vocals for example, or vice versa, or in fact any
combination of the 16 tracks, and this is how you do it. You can do this
even while your song is playing so you can instantly hear the effect of
dropping out any tracks.
The Green button is the default, and it just means that the cursor
passing along that channel will play back both Music and Video as it
comes across either of them. You are fine leaving the defaults on for
now. Think: 'Green means GO' (and if you are a taxi driver, Amber means
Accelerate). Pressing SQUARE will automatically reset all channels to
Green.
Try it out - first hold Circle and then press Square. Now scroll along to
number 1 and press UP to switch it to Red and next move along to channel
6 and just for variety press DOWN to switch it off. Try making 2 and 3
Blue. That looks really good! What do you think will happen when you
press START?
Well, that demo is certainly sounding a lot better with the annoying
melody nearly muted out... but can you PLEASE find which track is still
playing that bloody tune and switch it off! (I think you will find it is
row 5, since it has riffs named Edam, Brie and Feta - there is a theme
there but whatever can it be? All I know is that Edam is the only cheese
that is made backwards...) When you have got this muting technique down,
you can reset all the channels again with Circle + Square.
There is one final trick in Mute Mode, and you can probably see it
coming. If you wanted to mute EVERYTHING just to listen to one track (the
snare drum pattern for example), then it would be pretty tedious to have
to switch off all the other channels one by one. Forget that. With your
thumb on that Circle, scroll to the number of the channel you want to
hear and press SELECT. Everything is blacked out except the channel you
chose, looking just like a stage star standing in the spotlight ready for
a solo. Sing Monkey, Sing!
Now try muting everything but channel 2. Keep holding CIRCLE and scroll
Left until '2' is flashing. Let go of Circle and press Start. Look at the
window in the middle as this channel plays. Above the Mute Mode window it
should say "Rumbler 1" as the drum starts to play like a heartbeat, and
then it changes to "Rumbler 2" as the second bar begins, and you will
hear the subtle difference in the beat with this second riff playing. It
can be helpful to scroll around while a demo is playing for example, and
use these titles to identify different riffs as they are playing.
If you then want to hear any other channel solo'd, just scroll up and
down in the Track Editor window and press Start.
Remember to keep half an eye on this window as you are playing back your
songs. You get that LED 'level' indicator for each channel, so you can
easily see which channel is playing a particular element as you hear it
(a cymbal crash that comes and goes quickly for example will show as a
sudden 'leap' of Green into the Red. A channel with an ambient synth note
will stay pretty much constantly in the Green band).
That's all you need to know about this window for now, and that is nearly
every item in the Main Console explained. Phew!
Reset the Channels with Square and let go of the Circle button to return
to Track mode. Now flick the L1 button. You get a little click and what
happens? The two windows at lower right have become a menu of some kind.
Don't touch anything yet, but tap L1 again and your PlayStation burps a
little and you hear an electronic beep and those by now familiar green
buttons are back again. (Notice, there is a new arrival in that window
called 'breathbass 1' - maybe it had something to do with that burp? Just
ignore it for now.) Tap L1 once more and this time you are prepared to
observe that the Mode Ball has revolved again, just a quarter turn this
time, and now it has a Purple face showing, with what appears to be an
open book on it. But why a book? Ah, wait a minute - there is something I
need to check...
Tap L1 again to return to Track mode and now look over your on-screen
Help menu. There it is - that is what we are looking for: "L1 library".
Library = Books! Nice one. So you access Library Mode by pressing L1 when
the cursor is in the Track Editor window. OK then, so what is in this
library?
I H E A R A S Y M P H O N Y
______________________________
You have done some hard work and taken in a lot of information, so now it
is time for a bit of fun. Press L1 again so that you have the window
headed 'ambient' with 'basslines' underneath. 'Ambient' is the heading
for that style of music and 'basslines' is the type of music in that
particular list. (In this case, short samples of music that sound like
they can be used for basslines.) Using the DOWN button, scroll through
the names in this list: 'capable' and 'happy' - well that sounds good...
'magnetic', 'revolver'...'wobbler'? That's can't be so good - and there
are four of them!
Well, you won't know until you try. Take a glance at your Help menu and
you will see that X gives you a 'demo', so stop over a likely name and
hit it.
-Cool!
Do it again.
-Fantastic!!
Try another...
-Hmm-mm? Not bad.
...and another.
-Oh yeees! Hey, even those 'wobblers' sound pretty good; sort of like
'Dr. Who'... I can imagine stringing all four together and swapping them
around and upping the tempo and bringing in some keyboards and you've got
a Tune started right there..!
That's right... This is where your musical adventures begin. Using the
LEFT and RIGHT buttons, scroll through some of the 60+ menus. Notice the
word 'ambient' changes to 'drum n bass' after a dozen or so menus, and
then after another dozen in that category we have 'house' and then
'techno' and finally 'trip hop', before arriving back at 'ambient'.
[Don't get hung up on the names too much - there is such a variety of
instruments and sounds in there that it is possible to make just about
any style of music using a selection from them. See Appendix 1 for a full
listing.]
Every single one of those menus is packed with all kinds of music and
sounds - each grouped by style and then instrument type. Just press DOWN
to take a look and when you see something intriguing, press X. It takes a
couple of seconds for the PlayStation to load each one. What do you think
of the 'scary man' or 'funky bottle'? How about 'monk abbey... hello
robot... clever boy... alien tiger... santa sledge... starter...' It
sounds like the Grand National! (Not sure about 'deep blow' followed by
'messy floor' though...) Somebody obviously had a lot of fun naming them,
so you should have some fun giving them the once-over.
If there are perhaps two of the five musical 'genres' you find yourself
most interested in, you can switch between all the styles very quickly by
bringing your right thumb on to SELECT and then keep using Left and Right
and now you are scrolling straight to the first menu in each category.
There should be more than a couple you like.
OK, gather up! Let's see... are all the 'House' styles here? Good. Now, I
want you to give me some words to describe yourself. Basslines! Tell us
what you've got!
Some of these Styles have the identical sub-categories such as
'basslines', 'cymbals' and 'percussion' amongst others. Try several of
these to compare the different styles. The genre headings are really just
for convenience, as you will soon see that many of the samples in each
category can be adapted to suit just about any other style of music.
Have a really good dig around in each menu, because even some of the less
promising categories can throw up some pleasant surprises. Perhaps keep a
notebook handy to jot down some interesting discoveries so that you can
play around with them later. Some of them may trigger off a whole new
idea in you, so let your imagination run wild. You will soon be able to
shape those fleeting snatches of melody and beats in your head into
actual Tunes.
How do we manage to get any of these snatches of music into a song? Enter
the most powerful feature in MUSIC - the Riff Editor. (In Part Two.)
P A R T T W O - M A K I N G M U S I C
_________________________________________________________________________
I N T R O D U C T I O N
_______________________
This is Part Two of my tutorial on MUSIC for PlayStation. Part One
covered THE BASICS -
Introduction to the Main Console
Understanding the Track Editor
Loading a Demo
Using the Track Editor (Playing Demos / Adjusting BPM)
Understanding Modes
Using Modes (Play Mode / Track Mode)
Using Mute Mode
Using Library Mode and handling the Riff Library.
This tutorial follows on directly, so I recommend you read Part One even
if you already have some experience of using MUSIC. This guide is still
written assuming you are an absolute beginner though.
In this part we will look at -
Introduction to the Riff Editor
Using the Instrument Manager
The Instrument Library
Handling and Editing Riffs
Building your own Riffs
Fine-Tuning your Riffs
Memory Issues
[To follow this tutorial, you will need to have loaded from the disc, and
ready to go, the demo called "Disco" by The Evangelist.]
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We left Part One having discovered the Riff Library. Can we use this to
produce our very own tracks? Yes indeed, with the aid of the Riff Editor
- if not the most powerful Music-making tool in the world, then certainly
on the PlayStation when this program arrived.
"I T C A N B L O W Y O U R H E A D C L E A N A W F"
_________________________________________________________
Well, maybe it's not as powerful as a .44 Magnum, but it IS 'mind-
blowing' in its own way. With the cursor over a blank blue block (that
sounds like water going down the plughole) - press R1.
fig.2 - THE RIFF EDITOR [Best viewed in Courier New]
_______________
Now overlaid in the centre of the Track Editor window is a smaller
window, also with numbers down the side (going UP this time) from 1 to 6.
These too have musical notes alongside them and the number '4' is lit up.
There is a keyboard next to this with... let's see, 1-2-3...seven white
keys and ...five black ones, making twelve altogether. That is a full
scale! (A full-scale what? Is that another of these Musical Terms or
something? You'll have to take this slowly or you'll lose me...) Don't
worry - you don't need any musical knowledge to follow this tutorial.
Beneath this screen is a red menu headed 'loaded' with 'instrument'
written underneath that. The Mute Mode window has the mysterious words
'analog fat' alongside an orange square with the number '1'. To the left
there are now strange symbols in the Video window, but it is hard to make
any sense of them, as they are nearly blacked out.
Just as you did with the Track Editor window in Part One, have a good
scroll around the blue window. It isn't very wide; in fact you can nudge
the cursor along and fit the blue blocks right across it. It looks pretty
similar to the Track Editor window in that it seems to be made up of
columns of blocks, and if you move the cursor to the right, one block at
a time, you find there are sixteen columns across (this is the default
window; there is a way to make a series of blocks almost as wide as you
like, and we will try that later). This window is twelve blocks high.
Twelve..? Like the musical keys to the left? That would certainly explain
the dark banding - it actually shows which of the rows are aligned with
the black keys. (They are all the same, it is just a visual separation.)
It is beginning to make sense now, I hope. As you press Up and Down it
seems to have no effect on the window. But hold on though - look at the
numbers to the side. As the cursor reaches the top or bottom of the
screen, the numbers count up or down once and then repeat the next time.
You can reasonably expect that this is because the cursor is effectively
scrolling through an identical screen and you can tell by the numbers as
they light up that there are SIX of these windows 'stacked' one on top of
the other. Why? We'll soon find out.
Stop anywhere and press X. The menu to the left lit up like a Christmas
tree and the number '01' appears in the blue grid where the crosshairs
are. You also got a rather dull musical note. Press X to hear it again.
Could it be that the number '01' and the musical note that played there
have anything to do with the number '1' beside 'analog fat' in the other
window?
But of course. press L1 and the window that says 'analog fat' changes
like so:
fig.2.2 - The INSTRUMENT MANAGER
______________________
This new window is the INSTRUMENT MANAGER. It 'manages' which instruments
you are using...
...and right there at the top is 'analog fat' again, but now you can see
that it is just number 1 in a list of others. Use DOWN to take a look at
the rest of that window. There are names next to the first 8 numbers,
which go right up to 99, all of which after those first eight say 'Not
loaded'. And there is your clue.
Yes, of course - these are all the sounds and instruments used by that
"Disco" demo we loaded up in Part One. This window lists ALL the
instruments loaded into the PlayStation memory for use at the present
time. The "Disco" demo is very simple, so there are just a few
instruments loaded - the eight you see listed here. Scroll back up to
take a look at those 8 sounds. Highlight them one by one and press CIRCLE
a couple of times to get a demo of each. Interesting. So you can guess
that the idea is to fill this menu with all the sounds to be used in your
song.
Where ARE all these sounds? Previously we used L1 in the Track Editor
window to find a list of hundreds of complete riffs, but when we demo
these loaded instruments we just get a single note. How do we get them
into a riff? OK, make very sure that you scroll the Instrument Manager
down to any one of the numbers that says 'Not loaded' and press L1 again
now to see if we can find out.
W E 'R E R I C H! R I C H, I T E L L S Y E R!
__________________________________________________
Well HEL-LO!! We certainly have struck gold... Scroll around and see.
This looks just like the Riff Library, but there are hundreds and
hundreds of individual musical instrument sounds: bass, guitars, drums,
piano, keyboards and strings and every conceivable type of percussion and
many, many other sounds and effects. Not only that, but there are also
hundreds and hundreds of vocals samples - in fact, in addition to those
several hundred sample riffs we found earlier, these menus contain nearly
1200 instrument and vocal samples. Take a look at Appendix 2 to
appreciate just how many there are! If that lot jumped together they
could create a tidal wave that would finish us all.
Before you get carried away and want to start playing them, just be
satisfied with knowing that they are there, whenever you want them. Close
the Instrument Library by pressing TRIANGLE twice, thus stepping back
through the Instrument Manager and returning to the Riff Editor window.
The featured instrument should say 'Not loaded' because that was what we
left the cursor on when we left the Instrument Manager to look at the
Instrument Library, but if it says anything different then I expect you
were tempted to demo something out of the library. Which is
understandable.
*WARNING* -If you start pressing buttons in the Instrument Library or the
Instrument Manager willy-nilly there is a real risk that you could
unintentionally alter your entire song. For example the drums can change
to a piano at the simple touch of a button. This is great when it is what
you want, but can be a nightmare trying to sort out when you don't know
what happened. I told you the Riff Editor was powerful, so treat it with
respect! (And this is just the easy bit.)
Get rid of any stray instrument by pressing L1 again, scrolling to the
offending line in the Instrument Manager and pressing SQUARE to delete it
from memory. Then scroll back to number '1' which is still "analog fat"
and press X to load it up again, and there it is ready at the Riff
Editor. If the menu has been completely messed about and you have deleted
or changed too many instruments, then you can always exit the Track
Editor with Select + Start and load up the demo again as you did in Part
One.
For now though, we want to take another look at the Riff Editor so that
we can work out how to use all those instruments in our riffs. This is
exciting isn't it?
Move your cursor left or right and press X again. The original '01' is
still there and now it will be joined by another. Try a couple more,
spreading them up and down the window and moving along just a single
block each time. Then move to an empty column and this time shoot as far
up as you can go and press X when the cursor stops. Another musical note
- a high one - and another '01' left to mark the spot. Now nudge along a
bit more and scroll all the way DOWN. 6-5-4-3-2-1. 'Ding'; Basement -
Food Hall and Sale Goods. This time the X seems not to make any sound,
but the '01' appears as it should. Now for a surprise. Scroll the cursor
off to the left and press START.
What a racket!
OK, you are smart enough to realise what you were doing. The cursor was
placing music notes on a scale representing a full six 'octaves' - the
set of musical notes that make up a complete scale (think "Doh a Deer"
from The Sound of Music... And now you won't be able to think of anything
else all day.) The concept is just the same as having a synthesiser
keyboard with 72 keys, but that lot wouldn't fit on the screen, so this
is a clever solution.
You just found that this particular sound you are placing is nearly
inaudible on the very lowest scale. Go and find the note you placed down
there - all the notes appear on the same window, and as your cursor
passes over each one, the numbers at screen left light up to show which
of the six octaves it has been placed on. Try it and see. When you find
it (I think it should be on the bottom row and the number '1' next to a
yellow musical note at left will be highlighted), press X while the
cursor is over it. It just makes a sort of clicking noise to let you know
that there IS something there.
Move UP and keep tapping the X button and soon you will hear the note
ascending, the further up the stack of octaves you go, just like tapping
a keyboard from one end to the other. You should notice that the
crosshairs align with the keys down the left side, and you can even see
the notes 'playing' as you move along them. Keep going to make sure
you've got the concept straight in your mind. When the cursor is all the
way at the top, come down again still tapping X. Well, I don't know about
you, but I think it only sounds 'right' from about the bottom of the 6th
to the top of the 4th scale, and not all of those notes sound good.
You are still using just Up and Down here to place the note, and so you
will notice that after you place a note, if you move up a little and
place another, the first one disappears. You would expect this, as
otherwise you would get two or more notes trying to play simultaneously.
(Sometimes that is exactly what you want, and there are a couple of ways
to do this, which you don't have to think about just now.) You cannot
place more than one note in any column then, but you CAN have notes
placed in all sixteen available columns across the entire window if you
want, although it won't sound very good except possibly at a very slow
tempo. It is sometimes a good idea to do that with percussion though.
Delete all those unwanted notes by pressing SQUARE when the cursor is in
the relevant column (you don't have to have it over the actual note if it
is elsewhere in the column as the crosshairs will pick it up). Try
placing a 'proper' tune, now that you see how to do it. You should be
aiming to create a little melody of perhaps five or six notes. Something
simple like an advertising jingle ("Bod-eh-FORM foooor yee-ewww!") or the
chorus from one of your favourite songs if you can't come up with
anything else ("WHOA! I'm going to I-bi-za"). Nobody else is going to
hear this; it is just to illustrate the lesson, and you will delete it
afterwards so it doesn't have to be perfect.
I would say that if you have musical training, then you don't need this
part of the tutorial, and I guess most of you know what you are doing,
but consider that there might be a ten-year old reading this who has lots
of enthusiasm but no musical knowledge. (If that ten-year old is YOU -
It's way past your bedtime, young man. Five minutes more and that's it.)
All of us know what sounds good to our ears, so just experiment with the
placing of these notes. If you DO have musical training or any experience
on a keyboard, then placing the notes to make an instant melody will be
second nature.
You can of course preview your riff by scrolling left and pressing START.
When you have an arrangement that sounds attractive to you, then we can
try placing this freshly-minted Riff into the Track Editor.
M A K E I T E A S Y O N Y O U R S E L F
___________________________________________
Press R1 to exit from the Riff Editor and scroll to a set of four empty
blocks anywhere on the Track Editor window. With the crosshairs on the
first of these blocks, press X. A keyboard icon appears as if by magic.
Move to the next block and do it again. Move to the third and also the
fourth to lay down two more. Now scroll back a little way so that the
cursor is over that first riff you placed and press START. All RIGHT!
We're on our way...
Congratulations! You are a composer.
It doesn't sound too good though - kind of like a stuck record. I have no
way of knowing what little melody you came up with, but not many one-bar
ditties can stand to be repeated over and over unless it is a football
chant: "Sheeearer... Sheeearer..!" What we need is some variety brought
in to add interest.
Scroll to the first block in your new set. With the crosshairs over it,
press R1. The Riff Editor opens up. Remember what your tune looks like,
take a deep breath and use the Square button to DELETE any notes from the
first eight 'columns'. Use R1 to close the window, and press START.
As you expected, the riff has been mutilated, and the first part is
completely missing. The cursor moves on to the second riff and... THAT IS
CHANGED TOO! And the third... and the fourth! How come?
That is another example of the power of the Riff Editor - if you select
an example of any riff anywhere in the Track Editor and change it, you
will be changing every single example of that riff in the entire song.
Usually that is exactly what you want, and this feature is a great time-
saver when you are in full flow. For now though, it had an unwanted
effect. There is an ingenious alternative...
First bring that changed riff back into the Riff Editor and restore it if
you remember it exactly, and then place it back, and perhaps play the
whole section again just to convince yourself that everything sounds as
it did. Move to the fourth block this time and press and HOLD R1. Now tap
X and then let go. You have opened the Riff Editor as before, but the tap
on the X button has created a BRAND NEW riff modelled on the old one. It
is a clone of the original and now you are free to change this copy as
you please and the first riff and all examples of it will remain as they
are! And that really IS ingenious.
What we need for this riff is something subtly different based on the
tune that we already have. A very satisfying simple melody structure for
example is the 'Call and Response' that you hear in a million songs.
Sometimes literally: "Hi-de-hi-de-Hii... (Hi-de-hi-de-Hii!) Ho-de-ho-de-
hoooo..." etc. but more usually this structure is just a melody that
seems to wander off a little and then find its way back - like the chorus
of just about every pop song you ever heard. This isn't the place to go
into any kind of detail about musical theory, so stick with the test of
what sounds good to you.
We are after a final musical phrase which sets off nicely the first part
you already have, so perhaps take a listen to your set of three, and try
to imagine what short 'response' will round off this 'call'... We need to
alter it so that it still goes with the others but with a little interest
to make the whole phrase complete. Sometimes a simple Pitch Shift may do
the trick - just copy the notes you already have but move them up a line
or two until they sound 'right' when following on from the first section,
perhaps with the last note or two coming down to 'resolve' the musical
phrase. When you think you have it, exit the Riff Editor and there is
your riff already waiting in position four. Scroll back to the first
block and play this short sequence once again.
How does that sound?
You now know exactly how to bring an existing riff into the Riff Editor
and change just one part or all the parts, so tinkering about with this
little melody will be a breeze. But there is no need to get attached to
it, as once you are satisfied that you understand how the Riff Editor
works, we need to clear some space in the Track Editor so you can shortly
say goodbye to your first composition.
L I V I N G I N A B O X
__________________________
Move the cursor over the first riff in your composition. Press SELECT. A
Green box has appeared over it - this block is now 'selected'.
Something else happened: the Mode Ball is off again, and this time we
have an Orange face (Like Judith Chalmers? No. Behave yourself) and it
has an icon of a spanner. Fairly obviously this means that some kind of
work is to be done in this mode, so think of yourself as a mechanic
taking a wrench and getting to work when you are in Edit Mode.
Press START and the blue crosshairs appear as they did when you played
through the four parts just now, but instead of sweeping on through the
next block in the window as before, they stay fixed on this block and
play it over and over until you press START again. Of course that is the
effect of having just a single block selected. This is a great way to
pick out any block you like and hear just that single riff.
Press SELECT again, and now move the D-pad Right and you see the Green
block 'grow' to take in the second of your riffs and then the third and
so on until you release the Right button. Use any of the D-pad buttons
and you soon see that you can select as many blocks as you like in any
direction, anchored on that first block. As you might expect, just as you
found that a single block when selected would play over and over, you can
round up as many blocks as you like and everything inside the Green box
will also play in an endless loop.
Maneouvre the box until only your four riffs are 'selected' in the Green
box. Then press SQUARE.
Gone! What the..? What is this Red box? Help!
Don't panic; you can bring them back instantly by pressing X. Now press
Select again and the Red box will depart. What you did just then was
Select some blocks, Cut them and then (since they were waiting in the
PlayStation memory) Pasted them back. If you cut something else in the
meantime, then the first riffs are deleted forever! So be careful.
[In most operations in MUSIC, the TRIANGLE button means 'cancel' -or you
can think of it as 'Go Back'- and so you always have this one chance to
correct it if you do something by mistake and realise it at once.]
Try out the Green box once again - press Select. Since the box is on the
last riff now, try scrolling LEFT this time and lasso those four riffs.
Press Square to cut the blocks and after the Red box appears move around
the Track Editor window a bit. The Red box comes along too, and now just
press X on any empty set of four blocks and BAM! Four blocks present and
correct. The Red box is still there, so try moving four blocks to the
right and press X again...
A-ha! Four MORE blocks! Move to the next four and do it again... move up
or down and try it there. Well, that is very interesting. You realise
that you can create just one riff and paste a hundred copies anywhere in
the Track Editor, and before you know it you can have an entire song!
There is one very useful technique which can be learned here for later.
Scroll back along your line of riffs and make a 'stack', first just one
row of four, then place one on top of the next group of four and then
move along and create a stack of three, so they look like steps. Scroll
back to the first row of four and press Select to lose the red box and
then Start.
How does that look? More importantly, How does it sound?
That's right - the melody played normally and then suddenly got a bit
louder and then very loud as all three samples played at once. Cool! That
is a fabulous technique for building drum rolls to a crescendo and can be
reversed to build and fade out anthemic choruses for example. Use it
sparingly - too much and the sound becomes distorted.
Now use Select and the green box to round up every example of your riff
and press Square and then Select again to delete them. You will soon be
creating better riffs than that, so don't worry - they have done their
job.
L E T 'S G O T O W O R K
___________________________
Do the 'START and flick DOWN' trick to return to block 001. I promised
you in Part One that we would do something to sort out that wretched
"Disco" demo. Start by Selecting the riffs at top right called "Fever".
I'll give you Fever, mate - press Right and select all the riffs on the
top row and then Square and finally Select again. GONE and Good Riddance.
Scroll back to 001 and now press L1 to see the wonderful Riff Library
again. Remember in the first menu ('ambient - basslines') there were
those riffs called 'wobbler'? Scroll down to the bottom of that menu and
highlight "wobbler1". Press L1 again to hear your PlayStation burp into
life as it loads this riff into memory, and then you are back in the
Track Editor with 'wobbler1' as the featured riff in the Mute Mode window
as you expect. Press X.
There is that riff at 001 on the top row. Notice that a second 'wobbler1'
has appeared in the smaller window above the first. this is just to tell
us what is in the block where the cursor lies. Press Square and both this
window and block 001/1 go blank. Press X to paste the riff again and both
are back. But did you notice something else? The background to the icon
has changed colour. There are a couple of dozen sometimes only slightly
different colours, and this can be useful to distinguish between riffs
which have been pasted at different times (even the same riff) since you
may have since swapped a riff around and need to know that this is the
latest example.
You could start pasting dozens of these "wobbler1" riffs along the top
now to make a start on a bassline, but the hard work has already been
done by those kind folk at Jester, so press L1 again and scroll down the
next line of 'basslines' to highlight "wobbler2". Press L1 to exit the
Riff Library with the new riff, and now take a look at those central
windows.
The Mute Mode window now says "wobbler2" (because we just loaded it up)
and it is just the window on top that now says "wobbler1". That is
because block 001/1 contains that riff and the cursor is still there.
Press X. Nothing happened...
You can't paste a riff 'over' another; you can only paste onto an empty
block. That is a good thing too, or you might soon be slapping stray
riffs all over the place. This way you can see exactly what goes where.
And "wobbler2" is going on block 002/1 beside "wobbler1".
Next of course is L1 to go and fetch "wobbler3". Press Down to highlight
it then L1 again to exit with the riff in tow, and then X to paste it
into block 003/1 and finally "wobbler4" goes in 004/1. Phew!
Throw a green box around these four riffs and press Start. Does that
sound just a little familiar? It might if you are anywhere approaching
40... "Sahhhn your name a-cross mahhh heart..." That guy made millions
from that! MILLIONS! (But where is he now?)
When you have heard it a couple of times press Start again (to stop) and
then lasso them once more with Select and then the direction buttons, and
press X to Copy. Tab along four blocks and Paste with another X. Lose the
red box and there you have a very colourful top row. Scroll back to 001.
We have made a good start to 'fixing' that demo, but if you care to press
Start you will still hear a nasty noise.
Prime suspects are those 'cheesy' riffs on Channel 5. You are now well-
practised at deleting riffs, so round up those Sporrans and bin them. Try
listening again. It starts off OK but then goes horribly wrong at column
004. We just checked our 'wobbler' bassline and it seemed fine, and the
percussion is not too intrusive, so the culprit has to be Channel 6.
Press and hold CIRCLE to enter Mute Mode and switch off everything except
1 and 6 (Channel 5 has been deleted of course). With the cursor at 001/6
press Start again and watch the window above the Mute Mode window. It
says "Portal 1" and the trouble plainly starts when it switches to
"Portal 2" and the same thing happens on block 008 to confirm it. That
nasty riff will have to go.
Scroll to either example of "Portal 2" and press R1 to take a look at it
in the Riff Editor.
fig.2.3 - "Portal 2" riff ("Disco" - The EVANGELIST)
__________________________________________
Place the cursor on the first '07', which represents the instrument used
to play that note - number 7 in the Instrument Manager, which is called
"wobbly". You can see that the number '5' is lit up in blue to the left,
which shows us which octave the note has been placed on. Now tab over to
the next '07'. Notice how after flicking into the present background
octave - it will show with a white number - the number '6' lights up in
blue this time. Scroll over each one and you can easily see this pattern:
5-6-5-6 etc. The synth note is bouncing up and down alternate octaves
like a Eurovision song. No wonder it is annoying.
Exit with R1 and then take a look at "Portal 1" for comparison:
fig.2.4 - "Portal 1" riff ("Disco" - The EVANGELIST)
__________________________________________
That's a nice clean pattern - a simple four beats all on the same octave
(5) to give an urgent undercurrent to the 'wobbler' bassline we just
created. By comparison, "Portal 2" is all over the place. How about
creating a riff that will complement "wobbler4" a little better, based on
this existing riff?
Use R1 to exit the Riff Editor and find and destroy the two examples of
"Portal 2" (press Square). Now place the cursor over any example of
"Portal 1" and you remember how to 'clone' a riff, right? It wasn't THAT
long ago - HOLD R1 and tap X. Good.
You will need to set the correct instrument in the Instrument Manager
before you can paste notes in, so use L1 again to access the Instrument
Manager and scroll down so that number 7 ("wobbly") is highlighted. Press
X to select this and there is your instrument ready to go.
fig.2.2.2 - The INSTRUMENT MANAGER
______________________
This is a doddle. Raise the first, second and third notes by one row and
the last one three rows, and then place one more on beat 13 as shown.
This is the kind of 'response' riff I was suggesting you aim for with
that melody you composed a little while ago.
Paste this riff into positions 004/6 and 008/6 (press X), and notice that
we have a little problem in that the "Portal 1" riff we chose to clone
has now also become an example of this new riff (the background colour of
the icon matches). That's not what we wanted, so of course you just
delete it (Square), copy a good "Portal 1" (Select and then X) and paste
it there (move, X then de-Select), and no-one need ever know.
For a final flourish, copy the new riff at 008/6 again (giving you a new,
third variation). In the riff editor, simply use the Square to DELETE the
second note (on beat 7). This 'stutter' sounds a little strange on its
own, but it should give the underlying rhythm a 'kick' of interest. It
will fit in nicely by the time we are done.
Use R1 to exit back to the Track Editor. Throw a green box around all the
riffs in Channel 6 again and have a listen. Notice that although there
are definitely three distinct riffs in there, they all carry the same
name - "Portal 1". Of course this is because we copied that riff to
create the two variations, but you can see how confusing this will become
if we later try to remember which is the variation and which are the
originals. It is therefore a good idea to give these custom riffs a name
as you create them. Place the cursor over the first variation (block
004/6) and open the Riff Editor with R1 and then press L2.
P U M P U P T H E V O L U M E
________________________________
The first thing you see is pretty obviously a Volume control. It isn't
obvious what it is for.
When in the Riff Editor, L2 simply alters the 'parameters' of the riff -
think of this as 'personalising' the riff. Look at the Help menu and you
will see the controls you need to change the parameters for the SOUND of
the riff. Remember the existing settings first and then have a good play
around. Try setting one side to full and the other to minimum and then
press L2 again and Start your riff. Go back and swap the faders over and
listen to that. Whack them both to maximum and then both nearly all the
way down and compare the effect of each of these settings on your riff.
Interesting, no? You can really get some impressive effects here when it
comes to mixing your track. Reset the Riff Volume unless you really like
any of the others more.
Now press X and you will be able to alter the NAME of the riff. A menu
opens with a flashing cursor next to the original name which is of course
"Portal 1". You may as well keep things simple and just nudge the Left
button over to the Backspace and press X and then use the D-pad to move
over to the '2' and press X again. Always try to give your newly-created
riffs a distinctive - and to you descriptive - name. Resist the
temptation to give them rude acronyms. Use X for the capital letter and
CIRCLE for lower case. The alphabet menu isn't hard to use, but if you
mess it up you can press TRIANGLE to exit and try again. When you have
your riff name correctly entered press X on 'OK'.
Now you have the chance to alter the last parameter, which is the
APPEARANCE of the riff. You can set a different icon, but the default is
already flashing and it is just fine. There are dozens more in there if
you want something funkier. Press X again and it's Job Done. Press R1 to
exit the Riff Editor, and there is the name you chose in the middle of
the screen. "Portal 2" - I like it.
The name of your new riff is shown because it is 'loaded' and ready to
go. In fact it is shown twice, just as you earlier noticed the 'wobbler'
riffs were. Firstly its icon and name are shown in the Mute Mode window
(where the Channel indicators are) because it was the last riff to occupy
the Riff Editor. Secondly it also appears in the window above that
because it is currently under the cursor. Simply move the cursor over
any other icon to see how this top window changes. The bottom icon will
remain until you open a different riff in the Riff Editor.
Think of the smaller window as the Target block and the lower window is
what you have as Ammunition. (If you SELECT and copy the Target with X,
then that will BECOME the ammunition but it won't show in the Mute Mode
window unless you open it in the Riff Editor.) Prove to yourself that the
Riff Editor is 'loaded' by moving to an empty block and pressing X. Your
last riff will be laid there. (Delete it afterwards of course.)
If you are sure you have got the method of naming a riff straight, repeat
the trick for "Portal" riff 3 on block 008/6. (Riff Editor - L2 - X)
You still have Mute Mode set to demo Channels 1 and 6 on their own and
now just hear how that new riff and its variation 'responds' to the
'call' of the first three bars. I hope you agree that it seems to fit
with the 'wobbler' bassline a little better now as well. (Remember we're
not out to create a No.1 here, this is all just for practice.)
I wonder if you agree it is sounding a little 'doomy'? Great if you are a
Goth, but not what we want just now. Turn to our old friend BPM by
scrolling down to the bottom of the Track Editor at column 001 and use R1
to up the tempo a little to 124 bpm. a subtle difference but the song is
getting better I think.
It still isn't QUITE right though. Hit up block 006 in Channel 6 and
press Square to delete it. Now CLONE 002 in that Channel and edit it as
shown:
Simply drop every note DOWN four blocks onto octave (4) just so that they
line up with the black key next to the number 5. That's all.
Name this third variation "Portal 4" and paste this riff into block 006/6
(the example at 002/6 will of course have changed to match). What have
you got now? ('Portals' 1-4-1-2-1-4-1-3..?) It was a lot of chasing
around, but I think we've finally nailed it. Demo 1 and 6 again to see
what you think.
I'M P U T T I N' O N M Y H I - H A T
________________________________________
Go to channel 4 and let's take a look at those hi-hat riffs, called
"Frisky" and "Pacing".
Switch the muted Channels back on (Hold Circle and then Square). "Frisky"
is at block 001, so when the crosshairs are on it press R1 to open up the
Riff Editor. (Just the very bottom of the Riff Editor is shown, as I'm
sure you can work out):
fig.2.8 - "Frisky" riff ("Disco" - The EVANGELIST)
________________________________________
They use the same instruments (the sound is of a hi-hat cymbal
alternately 'open' and 'closed') but in two different patterns. Refer to
figures 2.8 and 2.9 and examine each one in the Riff Editor. You can
easily see that 'beats' 1, 5, 9 and 13 are identical (number 4 in the
Instrument Manager list at the moment is "cheap close"), so the variety
comes just from the shift in the other beats. They are not particularly
exciting, though.
This is a good place to start mixing up riffs, because this is
percussion, so you are only concerned with the rhythm and not melody. As
a start, it couldn't be simpler than this:-
Open any example of the "Frisky" riff. Take a copy so that you don't
affect any of the others.
[While I am working on a song, I like to store temporary riffs down on
Channel 16 and switch it off in the Mute Mode window during playback. You
might care to keep an 'original' riff or two down there if you think you
might be doing lots of editing, just to be sure you know what you started
with!]
Using this first cloned riff, simply delete the notes on columns 8 and 9
by counting along until you reach them and pressing SQUARE over each one.
That's it, there's nothing more to do here. Move along.
Don't forget to give your riff a new name - carrying on the 'movement'
theme perhaps, with something like "Stutter". Press L2 and then X to
reach the 'alphabet' screen as before.
Now to paste this new riff into the Track Editor. Move along from the
existing riffs (you might as well use Channel 4 where the hi-hat riffs
already live) to a new set of four blocks. Place one on block 014 and
another on 016 simply by pressing X each time. That was easy! Now scroll
back until you are over any one of the original 'Frisky' hi-hat riffs
(not the one you just changed). Press SELECT to highlight it with a Green
box, and then press X to copy it, so that the box is now Red. Simply
slide the cursor back to where you just placed your new riffs and lay
copies of "Frisky" on block 013 and then 015. Now move to the following
set of four and place two more, on blocks 017 and 019. Great!
Now go back to the original set of riffs and find the one called "Pacing"
(remember that the 'target' name will show up in the centre window when
you are over it). First DESELECT the Red box (with the SELECT button of
course) so that the green crosshairs appear and then press SELECT again,
as otherwise instead of picking up a copy of the new riff you will be
fruitlessly trying to paste the last riff into a block which is already
taken. The second time you press Select sets up a fresh operation, so
just as you did for "Frisky", press X now to copy "Pacing" into this new
Red box and now scroll back to your growing riff collection and place it
into the vacant space at position 018 and then finally put another at
block 020. Press Select to get rid of the bounding box and then scroll
back a little. How does that look? Very pleasing I'd say.
Scroll back to the original hi-hat riffs (001-008/4) and delete the lot
of them (Select-Square-Select). Now move the cursor to 013, over that
first "Frisky" icon and press Select. The green box has appeared again,
so now press RIGHT. We are after the blocks we just pasted from 013-020,
so keep tapping Right until all eight are sitting in the green bounding
box. You can't see the beginning of the box as it is now off-screen, but
you can be confident that you have copied all eight blocks as you press X
and then move the red box all the way Left until it stops and you are at
block 008. Press X again to paste the blocks. Get rid of the red box with
the Select button and scroll back along those beautiful icons. Press
Start on block 001 and sit back and listen to your handiwork.
OK, it's not going to start any fires, but you should be really getting
the hang of things and we now have our demo well under control. That was
so easy, and you now have a nice pacy rhythm accompaniment for your new
song!
Now that you have well and truly got the hang of editing riffs, let the
cursor run on to your cluster of hi-hat riffs and listen to them play
through again. You will have ideas of your own, so mess around with them
as much as you like. CLONE EACH ONE first (so you don't mess up your new
arrangement) and then alter at least a couple more to really spice it up.
Listen to the theme from "Shaft" if you need inspiration! Try these on a
'Frisky' clone for starters and your drummer will be quite a busy bee:
Really have some fun trying to come up with your own little patterns. All
the riffs shown here are created by simply removing notes from a copy of
the original "Frisky" riff. What about ADDING notes? Nearly as easy...
In that last section we were using the "Frisky" hi-hat riff to subtract
notes to come up with new patterns. Now we will figure out how to add in
notes to give us even more options.
Take another look at the other ready-made hi-hat riff called "Pacing":
fig.2.9 - "Pacing" riff ("Disco" - The EVANGELIST)
________________________________________
It looks pretty dull and it sounds pretty dull - just like a bored
drummer going "(yawn) ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR". We'll have to give
him a bit more to do. Move along your hi-hat riffs to the "Pacing" riff
at 004/6. Take a copy, Miss Jones. (Hold R1 while you tap X.)
All we are going to do is simply add in a couple of taps on the 'closed'
hi-hat at beats 4 and 12, to give it a little drama. Like so:
Your new riff modelled on "Pacing" is waiting in the window. The menu
below still reads "wobbly". The idea is to press X at a select point in
the Riff Editor to place our hi-hat sound, just as you placed "wobbly"
notes in those bass synth riffs before. So we have to go into the
Instrument Manager to make the hi-hat our chosen choice.
Press L1 to get the Instrument Manager. Scroll to number 4 in the list
which is "cheap close" - the name for our closed hi-hat note. Press X to
select it and there we are back at the Riff editor and ready to go.
fig.2.2.3 - The INSTRUMENT MANAGER
______________________
_____________________ _____________________
( loaded ) ( loaded )
--------------------- ---------------------
( instrument ) ( instrument )
===================== =====================
| 2| big beat | | 4| cheap close |
| 3| funky | - with X | |
| 4| cheap close | becomes: | |
| 5| cheap open | |2345678910111213141516
| 6| rezz | |ooooooooooooooooooooo|
Now that you have "cheap close" as the selected instrument (and you can
see very well by now that this is how you manage to obtain any other
instrument), you can start pasting notes into the Riff Editor.
Incidentally, this 'switching' of instruments through the Instrument
manager may seem like a lot of trouble if you only want to paste a single
note each out of a few types already in the Riff Editor, and of course
there is a handy shortcut. Just as you can in the Track Editor, you can
cut or copy any block and paste it elsewhere in the window. First Select
the note you want to Copy, then use X (or use Square if you want to
remove it from that block) and then just move to your target block and
Paste with another X.
As a bit of fun, try shooting up and down the window pressing X to hear
your hi-hat sound. If you move very far from the bottom of octave 5 it
soon stops sounding like a cymbal, but it does make some other
interesting sounds, particularly towards the bottom where it sounds as if
it is underwater. Up toward the top it could be some kind of clicking
cricket - just something to bear in mind when you get the chance to mess
about with all those other sounds.
Refer to fig.2.11. Stick a note on beats 4 and 12 and then scroll back to
the beginning and press Start to see what you've got. If you are happy
with that, press L2 to edit the riff parameters, and once again ignoring
the first 'Volume Fader' screen, press X to get the alphabet menu where
you can use that backspace arrow to delete the old "Pacing" and type in
another distinctive name such as "Skippy". Press X twice to move forward
to the Riff Editor then R1 to arrive back at the Track Editor where we
find our new riff ready with the others.
That should be enough to keep the drummer busy - "Frisky-Stutter-Frisky-
Stutter-Frisky-Skippy-Frisky-Pacing"... We have to make sure these
Session Men earn their money!
K E E P I N G I T R E A L
___________________________
I hope you are enjoying messing about with those practice riffs and
coming up with some interesting variations. Maybe you have a rhythm in
your head that you are having trouble in translating into notes in the
Riff Editor? Help is at hand: scroll to the beginning of the riff (or you
can start with a new blank window) and press and hold Start with your
left thumb as you press CIRCLE.
SHAZAM! The BPM indicator turns to a flashing Red light and you hear a
tock-tocking metronome as the window scrolls before you, over and over
until you press Start again. This is the fantastic 'Real-time Record
Mode'. It does what it says on the tin - your riff is playing at the
speed of your song, so with that rhythm in your head you can start
tapping out the beat on the X button and the notes will be magically
placed exactly where they should be without your having to place them by
ear. This is great for drums and percussion, and will work as well for
any other instrument, for example you will have no trouble starting a
vocal element bang on cue.
You can delete errors by tapping Square on the notes you don't want, (it
is like 'Space Invaders' - see if you can knock the notes out just as
they pass by the cursor) and you can also demo the current instrument
with Circle to practice with the beat and make sure it is what you want
before placing the notes. This is all very simple with the hi-hat you are
experimenting with at the moment.
When you have had enough, delete all your practice riffs from the Track
Editor and review the previous sections to get the steps right in your
mind. I bet you are already planning the next move...
Now that you have a decent hi-hat pattern going on, take another listen
to the full song. I know what they say about not making a Silk Purse out
of a Sow's Ear, and right now this song ain't no Silk Purse. But at least
it's not a Sow's Ear anymore. Stay with it.
At the moment, all the interest is being carried by that bass run. But
there is still something fundamentally wrong with the rhythm section I
think. The kick drum is inoffensive enough (we don't want a slammin'
House track at this point) so let's take a look at the snare.
"Flares are cool" eh? Yes if you are among the Ragazzi on the Curva Sud
and you are chucking lit ones on the pitch; No if you mean this drum
pattern. I don't think just shuffling the pattern around is going to work
here; the sound is altogether too 'punchy'. Scroll to any one of the
blocks on Channel 3 and bring up the Riff Editor. Use the Instrument
Manager to highlight number 3; in this case it is the drum type, which is
"funky". Funky Drummer? I think I've heard of that...
Use L1 to take a look through the 'snare' menu in the percussion section
of the Instrument Library (once again you can hold Select with your right
thumb to scroll straight to the head of a category). There are nearly 50
very different snare drum sounds; so if anything, there is too much
choice! Your existing snare sound "funky" is not listed there because it
has been 'borrowed' from the library. Scroll over any name you like the
look of and press X. After a little pause as your PlayStation is
retrieving this instrument, it will appear right there at number 3 in
your Instrument Library. Demo it with a couple of taps on the CIRCLE
button. Press L1 again and have another scroll up and down and you should
spot that "funky" has been returned to the library. (It may have been
overdue.) Try out any or all of these snare sounds, just by pressing X
and then tapping Circle in the Instrument Manager.
I like "jazz dry" despite the name, so go with that for now and see what
you think. Remember that swapping it for the existing instrument is as
simple as pressing X (which is why I thought I'd better urge caution the
first time we came here). And there is 'jazz dry' sitting at number 3.
F E E L T H E B A N D W I D T H!
__________________________________
You should have spotted on your Help menu when in the Instrument Library
that there are three options when loading your instrument. This has to do
with the sound quality at which you want to load the instrument. These
are:
11 khz - press CIRCLE. Lowest quality. Best for quick demos (RED box in
Instrument Manager)
22 khz - press X. Medium sound quality. Perfectly acceptable for most
recordings (AMBER box shows in Instrument Manager)
You probably know that 44 khz is 'CD' quality sound. 22 khz sounds
perfectly acceptable (unless you have your PlayStation hooked up to a hi-
fi), and saves a GREAT DEAL of space on your memory card - a lot more
than just half - and is nearly as good as 44 khz for most instruments. 11
khz does sound a bit tinny with some vocals and instruments, but is fine
when you just need some background percussion. I'll leave it up to you to
find out which sounds best. [Sound/Recording/Memory issues can fill an
entire FAQ. Please write one!]
I would suggest you stay with the Amber settings by pressing X when you
are selecting your instruments, and maybe use Green where there is
something like a drum break or a featured musical motif that gets a lot
of attention, and only resort to a low Red setting if there are memory
problems when you want to Save. (Which there will be.)
To get an idea of the difference, while you have the 'snare' section
open, load "hall" at the best quality using Square, and it appears with a
Green box in your Instrument Manager. Demo it with a Circle. Ah, a lovely
sharp echo, like the percussionist of the Royal Philharmonic checking for
levels with the sound engineer at the Albert Hall. Delete it with
Square, press L1 again and now load it back up at the lowest quality
(with the Circle) so that it has a Red box. Now it sounds like someone
banging a muffled tea-tray...
Which makes the middle option sound just fine. Re-load "jazz dry".
A D I F F E R E N T D R U M
_____________________________
Back at the Instrument Manager, and with "jazz dry" as our featured
instrument, press X to see the "Flares are cool" snare pattern ready in
the Riff Editor. The 'funky' drum sound should now simply have been
switched for our 'jazz dry' sound. Hit START to see what the effect is.
It is definitely better, but the rhythm is still not much cop. Taking our
inspiration from "Funky Drummer", lay down a pattern like so:
It should be fairly obvious that the drum notes go on the bottom row in
octave 5, and that is where they are now. If you go too far down it
sounds like you are underwater again and too far up and it sounds like
someone playing a tune on their teeth. Remember - Experiment! because
sometimes that may be just what you want.
This arrangement gives us a nice funky 'shuffle' pattern, so why not call
it "Funky drum 1"? If you exit the Riff Editor and play the whole demo at
once, you'll see it sits quite nicely with the other tracks we have laid
down, but I think we can tune the 'response' part of the run (bars 004
and 008), so once again delete one and copy the other. This bar needs a
bit more excitement, so try this:
Now, if you demo this in the Riff Editor with Start, you immediately
sense that something ain't right. The beat is fine, it just sounds too
'mechanical'.
Now would be a good time to see what all that 'Christmas tree' stuff to
the left is about.
A L I T T L E F I N E T U N I N G
____________________________________
If all MUSIC could do was what we have already done, it would be enough.
Of course we have hardly even scratched the surface... but at least we
can give that surface a darn good polish! The menu at the left of the
Mute Mode window contains a host of amazing tools and effects to tweak
your riffs note-by-note. If you are now serious about your music-making,
it will keep you occupied in experimentation for hours and hours.
I recommend playing around with EVERYTHING. Take it one step at a time
and step back after every change to assess what effect different features
have on the current instrument. For now, I can suggest a few things just
to give you the idea and you should take it from there.
Move the cursor over any note in the Riff editor (you should be looking
at your custom snare drum riff). Take a look at that window.
fig.2.14 - NOTE EDIT window
________________
,-=========================================================.
| | | |
| MUTE NOTE | VOLUME | STEREO |
| | and | PAN |
| Mute | REVERB | POSITION |
| the currently | on / off | |
| selected note | | |
|===================+===================+===================|
| ADSR ENVELOPE | VIBRATO | SLIDE |
| | | |
| Modify the volume | Top bar = Vibrato | Slide in pitch |
| envelope | depth | note-to-note |
| of the note |Bottom = Modulation| |
| | speed/frequency | |
|===================+===================+===================|
| NOTE REPEAT | SAMPLE OFFSET | NOTE EFFECTS |
| | | |
| Edit | Edit | Apply Chorus |
| Note position / | Sample | or |
| Convert to | 'start' position | Phase effects |
| triplets | | |
'=========================================================='
Read the manual for a comprehensive explanation of what these effects can
do - there are two pages alone that list some of the variations you get
from applying Chorus, Echo, Phase and Reverb and show you how to get a
Chord from a single note and much, much more than I can go into here. The
main effects we are interested in for tweaking our drum sound are the
Volume, the Sample Offset and also Note Repeat. Some of the others affect
different instruments in different ways, so we can't set hard rules here.
The problem with our drum pattern is that all the notes sound exactly the
same (because they ARE the same - we pasted the same note over and over).
This is a machine, after all, and so each pasted note is 'perfect' and
identical. If you imagine a real drummer hitting a snare, then each
stroke will have a very slightly different sound, almost imperceptibly
so, but definitely different. People are not perfect and many things can
affect the sound of a real person playing an instrument. Each drum hit
may be a little harder, or fall on a slightly different part of the
drumskin, or maybe his arm just got a twitch so he nearly missed that
stroke, or he got distracted by a fly on his nose or... you get the
point. What I am suggesting is that you need to deliberately 'roughen up'
this machine-made sound to get it to sound 'human'.
The human ear is incredibly sensitive (two even more so), it's just that
mostly we don't use them enough. You don't have to try hard to know when
a sound is 'human' or 'machine'. The features of the Note Edit part of
the Riff Editor can be used very sparingly just to give your songs a
subliminal 'warmth'.
A moment ago I suggested that every note in our riff was identical, but
in fact that isn't so. Place your cursor on the first note and scroll
across them one by one and check the Note Edit window. Notice anything?
(Apart from the fact that the window goes 'out' if there is no note in
the column.)
If you copied my riff suggestion exactly, then you have six notes.
Numbers 1 and 4 were existing notes from the original "Flares are cool"
riff, and we pasted 2, 3, 5 and 6 after we set "jazz dry" as our
instrument. Check them again, and you should see those subtle
differences.
The original notes feature 'Vibrato' (the central window has its Blue bar
on maximum). This doesn't seem to make much difference to our drum sound,
but is quite effective for notes which are held for a long time such as
strings. These notes also have the Sample Offset at '000000' whereas our
pasted notes have '000001'. Not much difference there, you might think,
and you would be right. [I notice that all the ready-made samples seem to
have '000000' as their default, but any pasted note will not go to 'zero'
- maybe it is something to do with the programming?] Anyway, what is
important here is to see that the numbers CAN be different, so let's find
out how and why.
S L I P S L I D I N G A W A Y
_______________________________
Exit the Riff Editor and point the cursor at an empty block and open up a
new Riff Editor window. Go to the Instrument Manager, and scroll down to
number 8 ("number 8... number 8..."). This instrument is "tab large" (and
that is either a kind of drum or a big can of pop). Place a note anywhere
and hit X. It is quite a loud percussion sound, with a hollow 'woody'
tone. Now for the fun part - press R2.
The box in the centre of the Note Edit window is now surrounded by a
green band which flashes gently if you hold R2. If you now scroll around
with the D-pad, you see that you can highlight any of the nine boxes, and
when you let go, that is the one you will edit. Check the Help Menu in
the middle of the screen each time for a description of the effect.
Highlight the bottom centre window.
There is only one thing you can do here, and that is to move the slider
from '000001' and it goes to '000368'. The Help menu says 'X play note',
but if you do that then nothing at all seems to have happened..? Keep
tapping X as you ease the slider back, and on about '000200' you will
hear the sound gradually increase in volume until you arrive back at
'000001' and the note is restored. What is happening is that this
particular instrument (and most of the others) makes a sound that starts
off loud and then dies away. Literally with percussion, the sound makes a
HIT and then fades. You were hearing the sound as it has passed the peak
of its volume and was already fading until at the end it had stopped.
Very interesting, but so what? Well, move the slider just a little bit
forward. From that loud echoey note at the beginning, by only about
'000030' it has become like someone tapping a block of wood and by
'000100' or so it sounds like a lavatory cistern and then like a very
quiet lavatory cistern and then it is gone. Any of these sounds is
available to you from this one note.
Try moving the slider up to about '000030' and leave Note Edit with R2.
If you paste some notes, you see that they all have the same setting from
now on, so remember to re-set the slider after changing any individual
notes. This goes for ALL the boxes, so unless that is what you want,
always set the defaults after using them for the note you want changed,
or all subsequent sounds will bear the same characteristics. (They are
automatically reset when you change instrument however.)
The effects of this tool can be very impressive. You can create a nearly
infinite range of sounds and tinker with all those otherwise
disappointing samples and come up with some real surprises.
A S A M P L E E X A M P L E
_____________________________
Press R1 to exit the Riff Editor for the moment and COPY one of the
original "Frisky" hi-hat riffs. Now move the red box over out of the way
to paste it and then clone THIS version of the riff (we don't want to
disturb our Tune after all that work). Take a look at it again in the
Riff Editor.
We had quite a lot to do last time, so you probably didn't notice the
settings in the Note Edit window. Run your cursor over the notes and look
particularly at that Sample Offset window in the middle of the bottom row
of icons.
The first hit of the hi-hat reads '000000' which we expect, but the
second reads '000021'. The third note is a different instrument of
course, but then the fourth (which is also "cheap close") reads '000042'
and in fact all of the notes are slightly different in no particular
order. If you care to check it, the "cheap open" notes show similar
discrepancies.
The composer of that riff has expertly manipulated each note so that the
sound starts at a very slightly different place each time, and quite
subliminally our ears detect this little difference and our brains are
satisfied that this is a 'real' and not 'manufactured' sound! Now that
you know what you are listening for, spin back and play this riff a few
times and hear the effect of each variation - Tic-TACK-a-TIC-tack etc.
Well, maybe the difference in that example is so slight that you don't
think you'll bother with it, but it IS worth it.
Experiment a little: first run along the notes and DELETE all the notes
after the first - just throw a green box around them and press Square as
you do in the Track Editor. Then copy the single note and paste three
more at blocks 3,4 and 5. Notice that as you press X to lay the first one
down, the red box will leap to the next available block in readiness.
Nice touch. Just keep pressing X then, to lay a stream of 'cheap close'
hi-hat notes right along the screen and then lose the red box and press
Start at the beginning of the riff.
It sounds like a machine-gun - TICK-tacka-tacka-tacka... an unremarkable
pattern, quite dull in fact.
Keep the first four notes and delete the rest. With the cursor on the
third note (which is the one squashed between two others), hold R2 and
scroll to the Sample Offset box at bottom centre. See how well you can
nudge the slider to get it to '000021', just like the example mentioned
above. Now try the fourth note and get this to exactly '000042'. Tricky
isn't it? (All right, you don't HAVE to muck about - just press Down and
now you can adjust it precisely.) You then have a note and a space and
then three notes, each with an incremental rise in 'Sample Offset'. Play
it. Like it? It goes by a little quickly, so now throw a box around that
group of three notes and copy them. Press X and the red box appears, so
that when you press X again it will once more jump helpfully across to
the next available set of blocks as you keep pasting, right across the
window. There isn't space for the last set, so deselect the red box and
cut and paste the first two notes in any set of three to complete the
row. Success! Now play THAT and what do you think now?
If it still sounds like a machine-gun, then it must be an Uzi 9mm! It's
beautiful: TICK-tacka-ticker-tack-a-ticker-ta-ticker-tacka! The notes are
exactly the same as they were, but we have added in enough variety to
give the impression of an actual person tapping out a rhythm and not just
a machine marking time.
You can go much further, but that is something to get you started - once
you delve into that little tool box, it will become essential. For now,
close the Riff Editor and delete that stray riff and the other if it is
still there.
A D I F F E R E N T D I F F E R E N T D R U M
________________________________________________
Think about our snare drum pattern. Remember that we just added a couple
of notes, and now because they are close together our ears can detect
that the sound is a little mechanical. I suggest we tweak a couple of the
notes to make each sound a bit different to the others.
The major problem area I think is those last two notes sounding in
succession. There is no way anyone could hit two notes that fast and have
them sound EXACTLY the same, is there? For these last two notes, I would
suggest we go for an effect like as if the drummer has slipped in a
triplet just to give it a final flourish. You can turn just about any
sound into a triplet with the aid of the Note Repeat tool.
R E P E A T B E S T (groan!)
______________________________
Open up a blank template in the Riff Editor once more, and as "tab large"
is still your featured instrument, plant a note anywhere in the Riff
Editor. Now use R2 again, and go into the Note Repeat section this time
(bottom left corner), and start switching those red buttons on and off.
Just tab along to each note and press Up for 'On' just like flicking a
light switch. It is a little misleading that the '3' is NOT above button
number three (we'll call them A, B and C), but alongside it - keep
pressing Right to scroll to it.
Try combinations of switches and press X to hear the result. It is
sometimes quite subtle, but with a couple of combinations you should get
a definite 'rapping' sound like a double or triple hit. Particularly
attractive is the clean double hit with the Red Note + button C only. If
you switch on that number '3' whenever C is lit (or vice versa), you will
see it go out. You can have one or the other but not both. Why? I don't
know.
What these buttons are doing is repeating a part of the note down to a
fraction of 1/64. For most sounds, this has only a very slight effect, so
you'll need to experiment. I can't explain this exactly - as usual, have
fun and try everything!
Red Note ........... = Dunk
Red Note + C ....... = D-dunk
Red Note + B + C ... = Drrunk
Red Note + A + B + C = Ddrrnnkk!
(There are LOTS more combinations; some instruments will sound better
than others of course.)
Lose the practice Riff Editor window when you are done checking out the
Note Edit features. Delete the stray riff and pick up that second "Funky
drum" snare riff again. Scroll over to the fifth note (next to last) and
press R2. Tab down to the Note Repeat box and switch on just the Note and
button C as recommended earlier. When you press R2 again to exit this
window, try pressing Circle to demo just this note. Impressive! (Nudge to
note 6 for comparison). It still isn't exactly right though... somehow it
is a bit too prominent.
Press R2 again and this time let's try taking the edge off that note with
the slider in the Sample Offset window. Take it to somewhere around 60
and exit with R2 and then demo the note again. That note has been muted
slightly, and now if you play the whole riff you will hear it 'slide'
into the last note so that instead of that robotic RAP!RAP! we have a
groovy para-diddlUP!
That worked well, so why not try mixing up the rest? There is no need to
do all of them - maybe just notes two and three. Take the edge off note
two very slightly with the slider and give note three a touch of the
triplets - try Red Note + B for contrast. Keep checking the effect of
each change, and don't get too carried away! Less is More.
As an alternative to the slider (which can severely dent a lot of riffs)
use the Volume on/off control at top centre, and just roll it back out of
the Red. Your ears will tell you how much is enough.
When you are satisfied, call up the alphabet screen and name this riff
"Funky drum 2". Paste a copy in the vacant space we left and demo the
whole song once more. The time spent on that snare drum was well worth it
I hope you'll agree.
Do you remember back in Part One when we looked at 'Tracks' and
considered whether 16 were enough to accommodate all the sounds we
wanted? As you see, our song is really taking shape, and perhaps only
needs a couple of instruments and some vocals and we would still only
have used about half of them.
If you really are going for the full 'Wall of Sound', then here is that
workaround I was hinting at:
Find "Portal 3" (it should be 008/6) and take a look at it in the Riff
Editor. You remember that we left a gap when we deleted the second note?
I know you thought at the time it sounded a bit odd, but there is a
reason for it.
Summon the Instrument Manager with L1 and scroll to an empty space -
number 10 is free I think. Have a look under the 'percussion - cymbal'
menu for "gate sweep". Use X twice to have it ready at the Riff Editor.
Paste just one note on block 5 and take a listen to the riff.
We are after a 'splashy' cymbal to fill in the gap left by the missing
note. This sounds OK, but actually that first bass note is being cut off
just as the cymbal crash arrives. In this case we'll let it go, because
there is enough going on at that point of the song, but that is the
technique for cramming in the sounds - just look to find two sounds at
alternate beats of the same bar in your songs as they occur and maybe you
can run them together.
By the way, sometimes that 'cutting off' may be just the thing you need.
If you lay three or four vocal tracks close together you can get a "N-n-
n-nineteen" / Max Headroom effect! [Ask your Dad - he was a bit like
Kryten out of Red Dwarf] If you want a note to STOP! abruptly for some
reason, paste another note right after it and use the Mute Note box (top
left) to switch this second one off. All you will hear is your abrupt
note, as the second cuts in silently. Remember - try everything. (In fact
that sounds like a good idea - we might try that a bit later.)
That 'space-saving' technique we just looked at works best for short
background sounds, especially percussion. Very often there is the kind of
beat that alternates two percussive sounds - Thank you Stock Aitken and
Waterman for bringing us the "Whoo!Yeah!/Whoo!Yeah!" - but there was also
that "Stars On 45" Bump-Clap/Bump-Clap... You know what I mean.
We can be a little more creative, so make a start by bringing up our
"Funky Drummer 1" riff again. Find an empty space in the Instrument
Manager list and go to 'percussion-wooden'. Scroll down to find
"scraper". If you look at the "Funky drum 1" riff, then you notice that
the first four beats are completely free, so simply paste one note at the
first beat.
Go and get the other riff ("Funky drum 2") and do the same. The effect we
want should be quite subtle, just enough to add a forward motion to each
riff. You should turn the Volume of the scraper down a little in Note
Edit - you can't hear it very well anyway, but it is supposed to be very
subtle.
Using this trick with percussion makes sense, because the drummer only
has one pair of hands, so he's usually hitting either one thing or the
other. Try not to cram your compositions with too many effects - we are
doing it here just to learn the techniques - because it will make your
song sound instantly 'fake' if there are two cymbals, a snare and a
cowbell at the same moment.
Actually, I think we have just about finished the percussion section of
our tune, so it is time for some melody - and that means we need vocals.
S I N G. S I N G, S I N G, S I N G...
________________________________________
Despite the fact that there are many hundreds of vocal elements on the
disc, it has to be said that most of them will be useless to you most of
the time. Nothing to do with the quality of the singing or anything like
that, it's just that... well... they just don't 'fit'.
Of course it is nearly impossible for the creators of the program to
anticipate your needs, and it really is impossible to string meaningful
sentences together to make proper lyrics that fit into a particular
melodic structure, so you will have to content yourself with lots of
vocal interjections such as "Oh, Baby" and "Everybody say Yeah". Having
said that (what I just wrote, not "Yeah"), if you take a listen to each
of the demo songs on the disc, you may agree that these make excellent
use of short phrases despite the same limitations.
Perhaps you can just concentrate on the music parts more, and use that as
a backing track when you manage to hook up with someone who can sing if
your aim is to get lyrically creative. For now, let's make the best of
what we've got.
When you are composing your song, a short burst of vocal might be just
the thing to suggest an underlying melody without the need for elaborate
verses. You can always write a piano part that will be your melody later
on if you feel the rest of the track is worth recording properly. Don't
worry about it just now.
Try to listen to each of the vocal samples, and build up a picture in
your mind for grouping several of them together to approximate a melody.
Most of the samples are listed in 'groups' already, such as all that
wailing about 'Freedom' or 'Temptation, so some of the thinking has been
done for you. For consistency, it is a good idea to use one or other of
the vocalists throughout the song, with maybe just a couple of extras
from another as backing in the chorus parts.
After a while you will get to know each vocalist like an old friend.
E V E R Y B O D Y S A Y "M A Y B E"
_____________________________________
Earlier on we cleared Channel 5 and that is as good a place as any to
place our vocals. Move the cursor to 001/5 and open up a new template in
the Riff Editor. Go to an empty slot in your Instrument Manager and take
a look through the 'singing' section of the Instrument Library.
Mandy seems to have a wide selection of vocal samples, so hers is a good
menu to start with. Listen to as many as you like; of course by now you
will have your own ideas about where this short section of a song may be
going, so pick something to suit. For this tutorial I suggest you find
the one called "spell on you".
Take a glance at your 'Memory' bars. The Red one at the top shows us how
much available PlayStation memory there is for loading instruments, and
at the moment seems only about 10 per cent full. Use Square to load the
sample and - WOW!
We have to make a compromise somewhere, and vocals are such an important
part of the song that they are not usually candidates. Just bear in mind
that you shouldn't load dozens of vocal tracks just for effect.
Place "spell on you" on the first beat, and take a listen.
There is an immediate problem. The vocal simply dies away: "I put a spell
on..." What? Toast? Why isn't the sample called "I put a sp..." if that's
all she says? Something is going on here and we're going to get to the
bottom of it. Press R2 and go to the Sample Offset menu at the bottom in
the middle. Adjust the slider as far as you can and you find it goes to
'009736'. That's quite a long sample, and certainly explains why it took
so long to load and used so much memory, so let's get the benefit. As you
bring the slider back, press X a couple of times and at about '004500'
you can definitely hear "...on yooouu..." so like the title says, that's
who she's put the spell on. So why is it cut off from our riff?
The answer lies in another very important Note Edit box - ADSR Envelope.
Like I know what that means!
'A-ttack/D-ecay/S-ustain/R-elease'. Oh. I do know what it means - but
what does it MEAN?
A T T A C K! A T T A C K! ...R U N A W A Y! R U N A W A Y!
_______________________________________________________________
The ADSR Envelope is the one with the green 'graph line' at centre left.
The line is a visual description of the volume of a typical note. The
sound builds quickly (Attack) and starts to fall (Decay) and then the
sound can be held (Sustain) different amounts for different instruments
before it ends (Release).
Once again it is harder to describe the effect than it is to listen to
it, so bring any instrument here to practice on and try everything. You
can adjust a bar up or down for each of those four parameters, but
actually the most important ones here are the last two, Red and Blue.
Make sure the Sample Offset is at '000001'.
In the present case, you see the Red bar is nearly on maximum, which is
fine, and we need to adjust the Blue bar upwards. Satisfy your curiosity
by ramping up the first Green bar and you find it fades the sound rapidly
the higher it goes. We need the opposite effect for this vocal. The
Yellow bar has the effect of halting the note abruptly. This may
sometimes be quite effective, but not here. Encouragingly, the higher we
bring the Yellow bar, the more of the riff appears, but it isn't the one
we want, so return it to zero. The Red bar seems to work in the opposite
manner to the Green bar, in that the less you have the quieter the sound.
We want to sustain the sample for its duration, so leave it on maximum.
Now (fingers crossed) let's ramp up the Blue bar...
Mandy sings: "I put a spell on yoooouuuh..." Success!
If anything, we have too much note. Bring the Blue bar down to just two-
thirds, so that the final '...uh!' on "yooouu-uh!" is clipped.
Exit the Note Edit menu with R2 and go and listen to your song. Not bad,
considering. Notice that the vocal seems to 'carry over' through the next
empty block as the cursor advances. That is why the sample was cropped to
fit I guess. So what's the problem? Well, if we place another block right
after it, we 'lose' that ending we have just taken the trouble to create.
We need a solution...
W O U L D Y O U L I K E T H A T S U P E R - S I Z E D?
__________________________________________________________
...and there is one. First delete the test "spell on you" vocal riff.
By now you don't even have to think when you need a blank template in the
Riff Editor - just press R1. However, if you press and HOLD R1, you will
see a Purple-Blue bounding box appear over your target block. Keep
holding R1 and tap the Right button and the box 'grows' to cover two
blocks. Release everything and the Riff Editor opens up as expected, but
if you scroll off to the right, you see that after the usual 16 beats
there is an additional set of (mauve-coloured) blocks containing another
16 beats! In fact, when you hold R1 and press Right when selecting blocks
from the Track Editor, you can round up as many as 8 blocks. So now you
can create Super-riffs which contain long 'sustained' string notes for
example, or long vocal samples like the one we have now.
Paste the "spell on you" sample on the first beat and press Start. You
see the blue blocks sweep by and run out just before she sings
"yooouuu..." which demonstrates pretty well why it had to be truncated,
but now the cursor can sweep on into the second section (the mauve colour
is just for visual separation) and the full sample fades out nicely at
the end.
Make a quick adjustment in Note Edit - throw the Volume to maximum. When
you return to the Track Editor, you see the double block and because it
has 'reserved' the following block, Mandy can now sing without being
rudely interrupted.
Paste another "spell on you" at 005/5. The particular sample 'leaps' out
a bit sudden, so we are going to blend it in a little - it won't ever be
perfect, but remember we are working with what we've got.
Open a new 'double' riff at 002 on Channel 7 (Hold R1 and tap Right). We
still have "spell on you" loaded as our instrument, so paste a note on
beat '8'. What we are going to do is create an 'echo' of the first "spell
on you". With the cursor on the note, press R2 and go to the Sample
Offset. Move the slider up to '002400' and notice how the abrupt 'I - put
a' has been dropped off the start of the riff to leave us with "...spell
on yooouu".
Back in the Track Editor, stick another 'echo' riff on block 006/7 to
follow the second "spell on you" sample playing on Channel 5. This starts
at 005/5, so you see we have a nice offset which lets the first "spell on
you" continue even as our echo comes in. Nice.
If this doesn't sound quite 'right' to you, it may be that you have taken
a little too much off with the Sample Offset. Try a couple of variations
anyway just so you can tell what is going on. Just by chance, the slight
tremolo in the "yooouu" nearly follows the notes in the bassline melody.
That was the reason for that nice 'shuffle' rhythm we created - so that
the vocal moves along nicely. Take the time to get it bang on the beat,
daddi-o.
Now paste yet another copy of this 'echo' at block 007/5, right after the
second "spell on you" there. This will mean that we have another offset
with the echo down on Channel 7, giving us a 'triple echo' and what
happens to an echo? It fades away... away... way. CLONE this last riff
and highlight the note. Press R2 and go up to the Volume box and move the
slider down just below halfway. Back in the Track Editor paste another of
these fading echoes in the space at 003/5. So what have we got?
"I put a spell on you... spell on you... spell on you..." repeated.
There is an obvious problem at the second time around. There seems to be
a 'lag' before the "I..." and actually this sound is a bit abrupt as
well. There are several things you can do to resolve this, and we'll try
a bold one: clone the fading note riff on 003/5 (to leave the other one
undisturbed). Scroll along to the end of the mauve section and paste a
note on beat 31 (the next to last block). This still has the Sample
Offset, so press R2 and slip the slider back to '000001' for this one
note, and also re-set the Volume but not quite to maximum. A-ha, you say
- but there isn't any space for that note to play in! Quite.
When you play your song again, you get the fading echo and then you get a
'Stutter' just as the second vocal riff sequence cuts in. We are after an
effect like that record that went "I-I-I-I-I-I Couldn't Dance With A
Mother..." Remember? Well, you get the picture anyway. (We are just
trying stuff out here, so anything you don't like - CHANGE!) The idea is
that the stutter will hit just on the rising note of the bass riff at the
end of column 004 to drive the vocal on.
Try Selecting everything, copy it and place the whole lot straight after
the first on column 009-016. That will give you enough to hear it through
comfortably. You can carry on pasting as many times as you like, but even
a stunning composition like this will pall after a while :)
There is one final touch. Go to the next column after the end of your
song (so how many times did you paste? If none at all, I mean block 009-
010/5.) and open a new double riff. Find the sample "under spell 2" which
is Mandy breathily pouting "I'm under your spell!" and after importing it
at highest quality to a blank space in your Instrument Manager, place a
single note on beat 6. Use R2 to get to the Volume control and take it
down just out of the Red (we want it nearly whispered), and flick on the
Reverb (just above the Volume slider) while you are there for a nice
ethereal effect.
Then go to the SECOND column after the end of the song on another row,
(to overlap with the other new riff still playing above it) and open a
blank template three blocks long (this means 010-012/6 in the case
above), and then find "bar sweep" at the head of 'percussion-metal'.
Far from being a Sad-sack stacking chairs on tables at last orders, this
is a magical tinkling sound. Import at MEDIUM quality - very important!
or else it will sound like door chimes - by using the X button and place
a single note on beat 8. Bring the Volume to halfway, and again flip the
Reverb in that box On. Adjust the Blue bar in the ADSR Envelope box to
full and lastly delve into the Effects box at lower right to apply "ECHO
GUITAR 1", which will send the magic spell echoing off into the night.
W H E R E D O W E G O F R O M H E R E ?
____________________________________________
That's it, there is no more.
It's pretty much up to you now anyway. All we have is eight bars... Does
it sound like an Intro or an Outro? A middle eight? A chorus? Where COULD
it go from here? On the decks or in the bin? You could copy the whole
thing as above and repeat it ten or a dozen times along the timeline and
there is the body of a song once you've added in some variations.
Don't go mad on this little tune anyway, the main thing is that without
even trying you now know how to:
Open the Track Editor
Open the Riff library
Use the Instrument Manager
Open the Instrument Library
Create your own riffs
Copy and Edit existing riffs
Fine-tune your riffs for a professional sound (well, almost!)
That's everything you need to know to start making your own compositions;
all that is missing is your own inspiration. Try listening to your
favourite CD's and take notes as you listen. How long does the track
last? How many instruments are there? Which parts are repeated? Would it
be better if other bits were repeated more/less? Don't forget to try
checking that '1-2-3-4' structure and see if you can break it down into
its parts to understand why the bits you like seem to work so well, and
maybe think up ideas to make it better. You are not trying to copy
anybody, but it doesn't hurt to learn from the best.
There are a load of other small 'starter' tunes on the disc, so go
through them one at a time and dig around just as we have done here,
changing instruments and altering beats. (Go to 'options' at the Main
Menu and choose 'clear music' each time to load a fresh one.) Listen to
each one several times and see what leaps out at you. Take a glance at
the counter and once again keep notes, so you can go back and figure out
how they achieved an effect or a certain sound. What instruments do they
use and what effects are put on them? Listen to the percussion and study
how the vocals are placed to complement the melody. These tracks were
made by professionals pushing this little program to its limits, so you
should still be prepared to learn.
Try thinking up intro's for the short demos - building the sound
gradually with a bassline and the first bars of the melody, or diving
straight in with a giant chord or a drumroll. Think up choruses for them
and maybe work towards an instrumental break and so on; you have ideas of
your own of course so I'm sure you'll be hooked on MUSIC at least for as
long as it takes you to write that No.1...
M Y M E M O R Y I S G O I N G
________________________________
I think I promised in Part One a look at memory issues, but apart from
the obvious - keep the number of instruments to a bare minimum and don't
pile on unnecessary effects - there isn't much to know. Notice that even
in our simple Tune, the Red Memory Bar is nearly half full and we only
have a dozen Instruments. It goes without saying that it takes a lot more
PlayStation power to load even these few at 44khz.
In case you haven't worked it out, those Memory Bars are:
Red ....... memory used to load Instruments
Blue ...... memory used to store Musical notes
Green ..... memory used to hold Video graphics
Orange .... memory used to store Video Chases
Purple .... will it fit on Memory Card? (Yes if space left on bar)
You may see these bars flash if there is any problem - hopefully it just
means that you need to prune the track a bit. Sometimes it may be best to
just keep part of the tune instead of the full mix rather than compromise
on sound quality.
On the bright side, the Purple Bar in our example barely registers, so
you should have no bother saving those eight bars to a Memory Card
anyway!
SELECT + START at any time takes you to the Main Menu. Now that it is
time to Save, highlight that option and press X.
fig.2.15 - LOAD AND SAVE SCREEN
____________________
The 'load and save' screen opens. There is a groovy background of swirly
red circle shapes on black. Overlaid, there is a grid to the middle and
upper left side with 15 boxes stacked five high and three deep. If there
is no Memory Card inserted then the first time you see this screen, the
first ten of these boxes will contain icons which you will now recognise
as a lightbulb/musical symbol combination. These icons represent the
sample tracks on the disc, which contain both Video and Music. The last
box contains a Green arrow pointed to the right.
To the right side of this grid in the centre of the screen are three
small boxes stacked vertically. The top one has the number '1' on it, the
one below that has a '2' and the bottom one has a CD icon. The '1' shows
whether there is a Memory Card in slot One, and obviously the '2' shows
if there is also a card in slot Two.
Along the foot of the screen are five large square icons:
i) The first of these is Yellow and is flashing; it has an arrow
pointing downward. There is a Memory Card shown on this icon.
ii) The second is Red and has a smaller arrow also pointing downward, at
six tiny red boxes stacked 2x3. This also features a Memory Card on the
icon.
iii) The middle icon is just an arrow pointing upward. If you have no
card inserted it will be blank.
iv) The fourth in that case will also be blank, and this contains an 'X'.
v) The last icon in the row has what appears to be a pink padlock, but
is actually a jukebox.
On the other side of the screen above these icons are two oblong windows.
The one at top right has 'name-author-blocks' written in it but is
otherwise blank. The other window has 'back' and 'load' next to a
triangle and X respectively.
If you have no Memory Card inserted then the clear indication is to press
the X to activate the flashing Yellow icon.
There is a beep and now the icon at top left is flashing with a Green
border. The menu to the right has filled up as shown in fig.2.15.
You can see that you can use the Direction buttons to move to any of the
ten tracks on the first 'page', and although they are all by the same
author, the name will change accordingly. Fairly obviously in fig.2.15,
the name of the track contained by the flashing icon is "Dwr Glan" (I
suspect that is Welsh). When you move the Directional buttons to
highlight any track, the Yellow icon stops flashing, so it seems logical
that any press of the X will then load this track.
You can scroll around to highlight any of the different sample songs, and
when you reach the bottom the Green arrow will flash and you can press X
to 'turn the page'. There are eight more much shorter samples on the next
page, and since these have only a Music icon, you can tell there is no
Video contained in them. Again you can scroll around using the D-pad and
now there is an additional arrow facing left, since it is now possible to
go back a page as well as forward. The third page contains the "Disco"
sample we have been using, and the following two pages contain examples
of the Video capabilities of MUSIC. On the last page are the credits for
Jester, the programmers.
Pressing X will load any of these examples. You are then given the chance
to load Video, Music or Both (if both are available). Take the time to
play each of these samples; there is much to learn from them.
D O Y O U T A K E C A R D S ?
________________________________
If you do have a Memory Card inserted, there will be a couple more
options available relating to this menu. The Yellow icon will still be
flashing and this time you can load a previously Saved MUSIC file. These
will be shown in the order that you saved them, one block each starting
from the top left. This is also a good place to bring all those old
Memory Cards you have lying around, since you also get a block for every
game on that Card - they have an icon and their name in the menu and
everything! (Not all games are able to support this function.) Now you
can clean out those old saved files using the fourth box, with the Pink
X, which is the Delete function. Careful!
When you have a card installed in either of the slots, you will be able
to press UP to send the cursor over the CD icon and then the '1' (or the
'2' as well if there are two cards) and you then press X to load from any
of these or come DOWN again to the row of icons at the bottom. If you
have not created any Saved files for MUSIC then none of the icons shown
on your card will be useful of course.
If you have just finished doing something in the Track Editor, then when
you exit to the 'save and load' screen the final icon will become
available, and this is of course the SAVE function (with a Red arrow
pointing upwards in the centre at the bottom). You are offered a similar
alphabet menu to the one you used to name your riffs.
I mentioned previously that you can save around 12 tracks onto a card,
but this obviously depends on how complicated they are. If the song you
are working on contains just short sections of work in progress, then it
might be a good idea to 'append' files with that second icon (with the
mysterious red boxes). This means that you can load any track from the
card and 'add' any other track to it in the current Track Editor window.
This is the easiest way to transfer riffs from other songs, and sometimes
you may be able to completely re-mix two tracks into one this way.
Experiment. Of course you can 'borrow' riffs from the songs you hear on
the disc for use in your own tunes this way too.
The Jukebox is very simple. First clear any music from the PlayStation
memory (with the 'clear music' function in the 'options' menu) and then
simply Select each track from your cards or the MUSIC CD icon in the
order you want to play them. You get an automatic lightshow to accompany
your choice.
Remember before saving that it is always worth pruning your tracks if
there are unnecessary elements such as a deep reverb on a note that can't
be heard as it gets buried under a crash cymbal for example. Always be
critical and think what elements you can afford to lose. That way, not
only will you be keeping the 'Insufficient Memory' messages at bay, but
your tunes will sound better too.
