MORE MUSICAL INTERLUDES

Producer: HCCS
Retail Price: £59.95

Some while ago, we asked HCCS for a review. After a reasonable time had elapsed, both the Editor and I ran up several quids worth of phone bill trying to wheedle a review copy for me to tinker with. Finally, the synth system turned up, but on arrival at Chateau Bates it was found not to work. More phone calls, a very helpful service department, a second interface, still no sound. Eventually it was discovered that the keyboard had a loose connector. Plug in and away we go.

Meanwhile something in the back of what passes for my brain rang a bell and I went scampering through my old leaflets and files. Sure enough a few years back there was, for the BBC computer, the very same keyboard and amplifier with a rather decent music package with tons of voices, effects, chords and percussion. I rubbed my tiny hands with glee. However I quickly discovered that the Spectrum 128 version was quite different. In fact the software is re-written and much simplified.

On loading up the screen displays a miserly 8 preset voices. Now whilst the sound chip in the 128 is not exactly the bees knees, the presets didn't really do justice to it. The voices had the right shape to them but there was a rapid series of clicks that accompanied each sound, caused by the software being organised in such a way that each tiny increment of volume and/or pitch created a very audible click. And as there are plenty of increments for each sound this quickly becomes very tiresome.

The preset display allows you to crank the pitch up and down either in fractions of a tone or complete octaves. Pressing the space key gets you into the sound editing page which consists of a static graph and allows easy access to the various peripherals of the sound: attack; sustain; decay and release. Unfortunately, you can't hear the changes that you have made without flipping back to the other screen display page, which makes sound editing a somewhat tedious process. It would have been most useful if the graph had reshaped itself so that you had a visual guide to the shape of the sound. In other words apart from informing you about the constituent parts of a sound shape (termed an envelope) the graph serves no active purpose.

The sounds you have created can be dumped onto tape and loaded back at later dates. More omissions - you can't give your new sounds a name, so if you have created lots of sounds you have no point of reference. Mind you, the system can only store eight sounds at a time, so shuffling through a tape to find that wonderful sound you made at 4am in the morning could take some time.

It comes with a decent full-size, three octave keyboard plus interface: the software is available on both cassette and Microdrive. I can't tell you much about the interface, as both the units I had were prototypes and not in their final form. No doubt, the production version will arrive in an anonymous small black box that plugs into the expansion port.

The company who originally developed this for the BBC and Commodore machines went the way of many other software houses - into corporate oblivion - and the remaining stock has been taken over by HCCS. The software for the 128 has been derived from the original by a development company who are headed by one of the original design team, and it is this software that lets the package down.

I feel that the software offers too few facilities and should give you noise-free envelopes for sounds! The market is full of far superior software controls for the same chip and with 128K of memory to go at, there is really no excuse for omitting such obvious provisions as sequencing, note display, song files, access to the noise channel, chord playing, and maybe some additional filtering in the add-on hardware. Not to mention using the MIDI out port present on the 128.

Although the system includes a keyboard, I feel it very non-competitive in today's market. One gets a trifle niggled when companies suggest that users could develop their own software for expensive products like this... It is one thing to make minor adjustments to a product by way of fine-tuning for personal need, but it is another matter altogether to launch a very basic product at a price which is far from basic and then expect the paying public to re-design it for you.

And why is the vastly inferior Spectrum 128 version more expensive than the superior versions for other micros?

THE DIGITAL KEY TO SUCCESS

One of the main reasons for upgrading to a Spectrum 128 is its greatly enhanced sound - from absolutely dire to about average. The new Basic commands do make it relatively simple to construct simple three-part tunes in your programs.

Nevetheless, to really appreciate your new sound possibilities and actually make music there is no escaping the fact that you need some sort of music keyboard.

The Echo Musical Synthesiser is a three-ocatve keyboard which comes with driving software and plugs into the expansion port of the 128.

At £59.95 it's certainly cheap and does represent a way of getting into Spectrum music without committing yourself too deeply in terms of loot.

SOFTWARE

The weakest part of the package I'd say. What it does it does well but maybe it doesn't do enough.

Once you have connected up the various bits and pieces you load the software. A screen appears showing a list of eight pre-set sounds or voices, chosen by pressing their corresponding number. None of the pre-sets sound much like their description - organ, piano, synth, strings. They all fall into the general description of bleep except that some get loud quickly and some don't. Marginally more impressive was a sound labelled Hawaiian which did at least twang in the true style.

The pre-sets can, however, be changed. A separate screen allows you to adjust each sound's basic envelope parameters using the cursor keys to select and then increment each section. This is simple to use and with care will let you get some reasonably useful noises out of the machine.

No real complaints in what you're given then. My problem is this: what the software provides is reasonable selection/manipulation powers but that is barely to make use of all the clever things your Spectrum 128 is capable of.

For a kick-off there ought to have been a simple sequencer included where you play in a note sequence on the keyboard and can have it looped round and round as backing. There ought to have been some sort of little composer program to let you key in notes using the keyboard. Additions like these would have enhanced the system greatly. How about it HCCS?

KEYBOARD

The heart of the system, the element on which it all depends. It's pretty good. Although three octaves is rather restrictive in terms of playing much existing music you are limited anyway, by the Spectrum 128's sound chip, only three notes simultaneously. Consequently the three-octave limitation may be largely irrelevant.

The keyboard has plenty of good points. The keys are full-size - better for novice fingers - and have a smooth even action. A little hard perhaps but that may be a matter of taste. Certainly the keyboard gives a string impression of quality and durability. Construction is in metal and plastic and the key switching mechanism is absolutely silent - not 'touch sensitive' as the ads say but I'd trust it to keep going for a long time.

INTERFACE

A smallish box with a slot for a ribbon cable from the keyboard that connects to the Spectrum. It uses a standard style of edge connector.

It caused no problems - no 'wobble' - and a metal surround to the actual 'teeth'seemed a worthwhile extra giving added protection.

VERDICT

This is an excellent value-for-money addition let down somewhat by the limited scope of its software - a fairly trivial fault to correct.

The system is recommended none the less to those with a 128 who are interested in music but can't afford the step up to a MIDI interface and real synth.

A NEW MUSICAL KEYBOARD EXPLOITS THE POTENTIAL OF THE 128'S ENHANCED SOUND CAPABILITIES. TONI BAKER TINLES THE IVORIES.

HCCS
£49.95

THis is a system comprising a musical piano-style keyboard and software to go with it, and an optional amplifier/speaker. The keyboard measures about 56cm across and has 37 keys covering three octaves. The feel of the keys is very good, and they react well to the touch.

To operate the system is very easy. The keyboard connects to the Spectrum via a ribbon cable which plugs into an interface, which in turn plugs into the edge connector at the back of the Spectrum. You must have a Spectrum 128. The system won't work on a 48K machine. Then you just plug the Spectrum in, select "128 BASIC" from the main menu, and LOAD the software. The version I was supplied with was on cassette, but I had no trouble whatsoever in adapting the program to a microdrive version, since all of the LOAD and SAVE commands were in BASIC - just change LOAD to LOAD* "M",1; in line 100, and SAVE to auto-run from line 10.

The software I was supplied with gave a menu on screen allowing a choice of eight different instruments. They were Piano, Strings, Organ, Popcorn, Evolution, Siren, Synth and Hawaiian. The blurb in the HCCS manual says that sixteen voices are available for a disc drive version (and if so I don't see why those same sixteen voices should not be available for a microdrive version, but perhaps they will be). The sound is reproduced through the television speaker, and also through the (optional) Echosound Speaker/Amplifier. The best sound is obtained by turning the TV sound right down and just using the amp, which is connected to the Spectrum via the MIC socket normally used for saving programs to cassette. The sound quality thus produced is excellent, and I must say that even without the amp the sound produced from the TV speaker isn't bad either.

The system makes use of the Spectrum's in-built sound chip, and is thus capable of playing up to three notes at once, which means that chords may be played. If more than three keys are pressed then only the three higher of the notes will be played - a system which seems to work very well.

As for the sounds themselves - well some are good and some are bad. The piano sound is good, but the keys are not pressure sensitive, which means that if you hit a note vigorously it sounds exactly the same as pressing the note gently. This means that you can't really use it as a piano. The strings sound is in fact a violin sound, although you can easily alter it (as you can all of the sounds). The organ sound is exceptionally good. Popcorn is a short blippy sound like that on the single of the same name which hit the charts a few years back. Evolution is one of those weird sounds which starts off silent and then slowly builds up, which makes it ideal for playing slow spacey music on. Siren is even weirder - if you hold one key down and keep it pressed it sounds rather like a police siren (one of those American ones), but the music you can get out of it is quite unbelievable. The synth sound is very nice; it's both beautiful and melodic. Finally we have the Hawaiian guitar sound, which is equally as nice.

All of the sounds are adaptable. Select the sound you wish to adapt and press the space bar. You will then be greeted with a screen like that of figure one. Now the up and down keys may be used to select the aspect you wish to change, while the left and right keys will change the actual values, I found that selecting values 10/10/4/4/4 from the "piano" sound actually turn it into quite a nice flute sound. When you've designed your sound you press the space bar once more, which returns you to the main menu. You can now rename the instrument on the menu by just pressing the alphabetic keys (eg FLUTE) followed by "enter", but note that only capital letters will be accepted. If the program was loaded with "caps lock" on then all letters will come out as capitals, otherwise the letters will be ignored unless "caps shift" is used. You can now play your new instrument.

Instead of having to recreate new sounds every time you switch the thing on, you can load and save sounds very easily. Pressing the semi-colon key produces the message "SAVE filename" at the bottom of the screen. You can escape from this by entering the empty string, otherwise you must input a filename. All of your sounds will be saved with this filename. Similarly, by pressing the quotes key you get "LOAD filename" and are able to retrieve previously saved sounds. The software supplied loads and saves to and from cassette, however by changing lines 220 and 320 I was able to instead use the microdrive. This eliminates the problem of having to line the cassette up before loading in data, and is much faster.

The main display also allows you to change octave by pressing the left and right keys. You can go from -2 to +2 in steps of one octave. You can also change the pitch by pressing the up and down keys. Here you can go from -96 to +96 and each step represents a quarter of a semi-tone. By playing with these controls whilst playing a note you can get some good warble effects HCCS say there should be more software for the keyboard in future. We are promised a record and playback facility, and a repeat facility which could provide a backing track. I haven't seen these options, but then my package came without an instruction book, so maybe I've just missed them.

The keyboard and software is incredibly cheap for what it is at fifty quid (£49 95). The Speaker/Amplifier is forty quid (£39.95) but if you've got one of these hi-fi stereo tellys you probably won't need it. Actually it's possible to take the sound from the Spectrum's MIC socket into any hi-fi amplifier, so it you've already got one you don't need HCCS's. In any case the amp is good, although I would question its value for money, since it puts up the cost of the keyboard system by nearly 80%. The keyboard, though, is certainly well worth buying and is exceptional value for money.