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Subsections


Creating Effects

It's really quite amazing how easy and effective it is to create different patterns, sequences and special effects. As we develop the program we try lots of silly things...this chapter is an attempt to display and preserve some of them.

The examples don't show any music to apply the patterns or sequences to. We assume that if you've gotten this far in the manual you'll know that you should have something like:

1 C
2 G
3 G
4 C

as a simple test piece to apply tests to.

Overlapping Notes

We've mentioned earlier that you should create patterns so that notes don't overlap. However, here's an interesting effect which relies on ignoring that advice:

Begin Scale
    define S1 1 1+1+1+1 90
    define S32 S1 * 32
    Sequence S32
    ScaleType
    Direction Both
    Voice Accordion
    Octave 5
End

We define ``S1'' with a note length of 4 whole notes (1+1+1+1) so that when we multiply it for S32 we end up with a pattern of 32 8th notes. Of course, the notes overlap. Running this up and down a chromatic scale is ``interesting.''

You might want to play with this a bit and try changing ``S1'' to:

define S1 1 1 90

to see what the effect is of the notes overlapping.

Jungle Birds

Here's another use for Scales. We decided that some jungle sounds would be perfect as an introduction to ``Yellow Bird''.

groove Rhumba
Begin Scale
    define S1 1 1 90
    define S32 S1 * 32
    Sequence S32
    ScaleType Chromatic
    Direction Random
    Voice BirdTweet
    Octave 5 6 4 5
    RVolume 30
    Rtime 2 3 4 5
    Volume pp pp ppp ppp
End
DefGroove BirdRumba

The above is an extract from the MMA score. The entire song is included in the ``songs'' directory of this distribution.

A neat trick is to create the bird sound track and then add it to the existing Rhumba groove. Then we define a new groove. Now we can select either the library ``rhumba'' or our enhanced ``BirdRhumba'' with a simple Groove directive.


next up previous
Next: Frequency Asked Questions Up: Reference Manaul Previous: Paths, Files and Libraries
2004-04-19