This month Jon Bates gets well into a new music utility from RAM Electronics and FLARE Technology. It seems this little number just about does everything… maybe you should get talking to Santa?

Producer: Ram/Flare
Retail Price: £49.95

This is one of the best all round music add-ons for the Spectrum that I've seen. With it you get a very decent sound sampler and sequencer that enables you to sample sounds, edit them and then compose tunes with them bar by bar into a composition using the sequencer option.

Very cleverly it has a set of drum sounds that you can use as a built-in drum machine once the software is loaded. There have been other packages that either give you drums, sampling, some sort of tune composer and MIDI interface but The Music Machine takes the best of each option and puts them all together in a well documented package. You don't need to be an expert as it uses a very simplified music notation that encourages you to experiment with sounds to whatever you want.

The option of MIDI interface means that RAM's hardware can become part of a complete home music system using synths and other music devices. As you may have realised, it does not use a sound chip for its sound. Rather, it comes with pre-recorded samples which can be either altered or replaced with your own. The package arrives with a dinky microphone, but you can get away with putting any sound source directly in so long as you are careful. All tunes, rhythms and samples can be saved onto either cassette or Microdrive and although the software is cassette based it too can be downloaded to Microdrive. Having loaded up, the main menu gives you a whole pile of option pages - I'll run through these to give you some idea of what the equipment can do.

PLAY All pages have this option and The Music System will either play your sample, drum sound, composed bar or complete tune depending on the page displayed. On the main menu page this option performs the factory-set demonstration tune.

PIANO This converts some of the top two rows of qwerty keys into a one octave keyboard on which you can play any selected or created sample direct from your micro - sounds really funny with drums! The name of the current sample played is displayed. The display does away with the need for an overlay as it illustrates the keyboard on screen. It might have been useful to have more than one octave available here, as most tunes use a wider range. Unfortunately this page is only monophonic (one note at a time).

SAMPLER Here life starts to get interesting. The sampler has two methods of recording a sound. Like most tape recorders it has either an automatic record level or a manual record level, set with a slider on the hardware. There is a bar graph on-screen that changes colour as the input level increases. In automatic mode recording only happens above a preset threshold. With the manual option any level can be recorded, but only if the trigger key is depressed. There are some limitations to the amount of sound you can record to - this is also in direct relationship to the pitch of the note. The general guide (without getting too technical) is that the highest note you can record is half the sampling rate. For our techno buffs this means that the highest note it will accept is 9.5kHz, which is well above the top notes of the piano, although a little limiting on the upper harmonics.

However, the total time capacity at present is only one second. So each of the eight samples had better be pretty damn short. Not to worry. As you will see, the Music Machine has some very useful features to help you around some of these problems. Having captured your sample you will more than likely find that it has gaps at the beginning and end, or that it simply is not percussive enough (headbangers anonymous will love this!). Back via the main menu we find the…

SAMPLE EDITOR This lets you see a graphic representation of your sample on screen. By judicious use of the editing facilities you can chop the blank bits of the start and finish off your sample. If the sound is not percussive enough (that is, it has a slow rise time) the you can chop the beginning of the sample to suit. For finite editing the page has a 'zoom' facility that enables you to enlarge the graph for the start and end of your sound and make the edit absolutely spot on.

Lovers of the bizarre will rejoice in the knowledge that the sample can also be reversed for weird effects. For continuous sounds like strings there is a loop facility which endlessly repeats the sound as long as you hold onto the key. All in all a pretty good effort at home sampling without the tears and frustration of a mega-overdraft.

ECHO Obviously, with a sampler the possibilities for echo and delay are abundant. You can delay your voice for up to one and a half seconds by selecting this option, noting the delay time on screen. I would be more effective if you plugged the microphone via a mixer that gave you separate outputs for an effects send and return). This would allow you to mix the treated and untreated signal to give variable 'double-tracking' effects to whatever sound you have input. Real laughs start when you put headphones on and try to hold a conversation with yourself through The Music Machine with it adding about a one second delay to the sound that reaches your ears.

BAR EDITOR AND DRUM EDITOR The prime difference between these compositional tools is that the drum editor lets you play all the samples and the bar editor accesses selected samples. The bar editor only allows two notes simultaneously (duophonic no less!), although these can be different voices. These options function much like other tune composers we have seen in the past in that you can compose a bar, mess around and gradually perfect it. Once you'rehappy with a bar, move on to the next one....

The notation used is not standard, although it uses conventional staves - the time signature is unreasonably inflexible at present: anything with three beats to the bar can upset it a little. However this is being corrected as this issue is being printed. Each bar composed can be given a name - for instance 'intro', 'verse'or whatever expletive comes to mind. The drum editor works very much on the same basis except that each drum sound is given a line on screen.

TUNE EDITOR This assembles the bar patterns created in either drum or bar mode. You have to list each appearance of the bar, so 256 repeats of bar One could be a bit of a pain to enter. One big minus here is that owing to the limitations of the computer The Music Machine will not run a tune and drum pattern together. Shame. This means that it's either down to the good old tape recorder or using the MIDI options to play the synth voices while the drum machine ploughs relentlessly on.

MIDI Either you play the samples internally from the qwerty or externally from your MIDI keyboard. Presto, an instant sampler. Or you could use The Music Machine as a drum machine. Or you could get it top play the tune in the sequencer in time with the drums in your keyboard. In other words it will send and respond to note on/off commands, pitch values, and the MIDI timing clock pulses on any or all sixteen channels.

Future developments for the package look good with a 128k version of the software out soon with increased sample time. Later on there will be software that converts the package to either a dedicated drum machine, MIDI realtime recorder or music sequencer.

Clearly, The Music Machine is going to be the basis of several specialised music utilities. In general the whole package represents excellent value for money and I would suggest that as Santa is thinking of whipping his reindeer into action soon, it might be an idea to get him to do you the courtesy of dropping a Music Machine down whatever passes for your chimney.

WE MAKE IT SO HARD

Datel Electronics are one of the country's leading hardware retailers. You may have seen their advertisements in CRASH or may even have bought something from them. If you are thinking of sending off for any of their products in the future WAIT! NICK ROBERTS has checked them out for you first and given marks out of five on the Nickometer!

The Music Machine
£49.95

Making music on the Spectrum has never been an easy affair. The BEEP command is now seen as a joke when you look at what some computers can achieve, but for those who still want to create musical masterpieces on the Spectrum: here comes The Music Machine.

This is a sound sampling system that allows any sound to be recorded and stored in the computer RAM These sounds can then be replayed either in a keyboard or drum machine situation. The package comprises a plug-in unit that connects to the back of your Speccy, a software tape and a microphone for use in sampling. The unit has a level control, headphone, microphone, audio out, MIDI In, MIDI thru and MIDI out sockets.

The quality of the samples The Music Machine can produce is quite good when you think of the limitations of the Spectrum - sample time is very limited though. Writing music has been simplified by using the on-screen facilities. You write as you would a normal song by using notes and bars, and once written, songs can be stored on tape for future use. Making new songs can be done by selecting bars from songs and merging them together into a new composition.

For those with a MIDI instrument, you can connect it to The Music Machine and use it to trigger sampled sounds or play a mixture of the MIDI instrument sounds and The Music Machine effects. The, songs and sounds you can create using this system are hardly Top Of The Pops quality but The Music Machine does provide a good starting point for the beginner.

Music is one area where the Spectrum - particularly since the 128K - is beginning to shine.

Now. after Cheetah's Spectrum sampler comes another potentially very exciting music peripheral - Ram Electronics' Music Machine.

Music Machine is a very sophisticated, yet low-cost (£49.95), hardware and software device which lets you sample and edit sounds and musical notes, store them, and play them back.

Its pedigree is interesting, too. The Music Machine has been developed by a group of ex-Sinclair employees - calling themselves Flare - and much of the development work on Music Machine was apparently originally intended for use in Sinclair's abortive Amiga-bashing Spectrum compatible - the Loki.

The Music Machine, like the Specdrum, has circuitry to play digitally recorded sounds into an amplifier.

Unlike the Specdrum, it also has the wherewithal to record sounds, and can be linked to external synthesisers or other music machines. This is due to the inclusion of a full MIDI interface. MIDI is a standard adopted by synthesiser manufacturers, much the same as RS232 for computers but a lot faster and easier to use. It allows any synth to drive any other synth, sequencer or drum machine similarly endowed. It's proved very popular, and few professional electronic musical products of the last couple of years lack the facility.

Before launching into the review, it should be made clear that the hardware and software tested were preproduction, and thus prone to a bug or two. This has meant that I couldn't test a couple of features. Ram assured me that everything will be hunky-dory at launch.

Setting up the Music Machine is painless. It plugs into the Spectrum like any other peripheral, and it has a headphone socket, so you don't have to bother with amplifiers if you don't want to. The software comes on cassette, but has a Transfer to Microdrive function. On powering up and loading the software, you're confronted with the main menu: various options, each selected by a single keypress. Also shown is the list of sound samples currently in the machine (up to eight at once), and the amount of free space in milliseconds. This free space indicator is visible on most options, so you can fine-tune the space given to each sample.

Sampling is the name given to the process of recording a sound into Ram. It's as simple as using a tape recorder: place the microphone (included with the MM) near the sound, set the level by twiddling a knob on the box, and press a button. Level setting is made easy by a on-screen meter, and the sampling facilities, so you're limited to purely natural noises. By moving a pair of pointers, you can select any portion of your recording. This serves two functions, firstly you can get just the drum sound (say) from a bit of music, and you liberate the rest of the memory which was taken up with unwanted bits of the sample.

Memory is a problem with the Music Machine. For various reasons, only the top 32K of a 48K Spectrum's memory con be used to hold sample data. Even though the software leaves as much of that 32K free as possible, that's still only enough for around a second of sound. Dividing that amongst eight samples is not a lot. It's not quite as bad as it seems, though. For a start, drum sounds are almost always only about a tenth of a second long, so there's enough there to get a very useful kit (a set of drum samples comes with the software, by the way). The software takes great pains to liberate any unused space, and dynamically allocates any it finds to the sample you're currently working on. You can have just one sample of a second in length, or three of 200 milliseconds and one of 400, or whatever you fancy. But it's still not a lot.

Once you've got your sample (or samples), there are three or four things you can do. It all depends on whether you want to treat the sounds as drums or music. If you want to lay down some riddim, then the Music Machine allows you to play up to three different sample at once, and arrange them in bars and into tunes.

Like this, it acts very much as a Specdrum, but the facilities for composition are rather easier to use.

If you're feeling melodic, then you can arrange notes on a stave with a strange sort of quasi-musical notation, and build up a tune that way. In this mode, you're limited to one sample, but you can play it at two different pitches simultaneously. And if you're into live performances, you can either turn the Spectrum into a piano keyboard (one octave, with shifts up and down an octave on the Caps and Symbol Shift keys) and play a sample on that, or turn a few keys in a drumpad and pat it with your fingers just like a drum kit.

There are troubles with these live play options: the Q key, which is used to Quit from the option, is adjacent to the keyboard/drum kit section, and is very easy to press by accident, and there's a buzz on the sound when using the piano keyboard. When a sample is played at a different pitch from the original, the length of the note changes, just like a tape player at the wrong speed. Better software would keep note lengths constant, but you can make a sample loop, or repeat until you release a key. With care, this can produce some very plausible choral effects.

As for the sound quality, again, technicalities rear their ugly heads every which way. There are two magic figures for the quality of a digital audio system like the Music Machine, - sample rate and word width. For true hi-fi, you need at least 30-40 kHz for the rate, and 12 bits for the word width. The Music Machine uses 19.4 kHz and 8 bits.

While this means that, no, you can't sample Dire Straits and not tell the difference, it does give a respectable response, and you do get a (reasonably) useful amount of space for your digital doings. Some care has to be taken to get the levels right, as the MM seems sensitive to hiss or overload, but properly done the sound ain't at all bad. On a side-by-side comparison with the Specdrum, using the samples supplied, nine out of ten housepersons couldn't really tell the difference.

I'm not sure it's quite good enough for serious musician-type noises, but it's more than adequate for the discerning hobbyist. And I wouldn't really be surprised to her the MM crop up on an album or two.

Then there's the aforementioned MIDI. On my sample, it wasn't working reliably, but in it's good moments I could plug in my trusty Casio CZ101 synth and play samples from the keyboard, just like a Fairlight.

The MM can also play a drum track whilst outputting two voices of music via MIDI, or drive a drum machine and play two voices of music. There's no analogue sync available, however, and this could pose a problem as MIDI hasn't percolated down quite as far as the budget drum machines yet. The sequencer facilities are rather limited, also, and there's no way of storing incoming MIDI information which is a big shame.

The last thing the MM does is act as a digital delay line. Speak into the microphone, and the requisite number of milliseconds later your voice reappears from the depth of the Spectrum. There's no feedback provided, so for reveberation and echo effects the microphone has to be within hearing distance of a loudspeaker.

Maybe you've noticed that the manual hasn't been mentioned yet. That's because the pre-release notes that came with the MM were accurate, well written and helpful. They did the job well.

The bottom line approaches. I spent a good weekend fiddling with the MM, and enjoyed myself no end.

The hardware is capable and compact, and obviously able to make nice noises.

The software that comes with it is easier to criticise, it does a lot of things moderately well but nothing splendidly. It would have been nice to have a better sequencer, a 'draw a waveform' facility and various preset waveforms.

I also get the feeling that the Music Machine would be a lot happier with at least 128K Ram; an ordinary Spectrum is just a little too restrictive.

The Music Machine is very good value for money, methinks. At £49.95 it does do an awful lot, but it is limited by the software if you want to do anything more than just play around.

That's a niggle - it must have the highest fun-per-pfennig rating of any Spectrum peripheral to date.

THE MUSIC MACHINE MUSCLES IN

Owners of Spectrum and Amstrad CPC computers have not been particularly well-served for musical software and hardware. Now, to their rescue, Ram Electronics has an all-singing, all-dancing package called The Music Machine. Tony Sacks examines.

It is a sound sampler, a drum machine, a composer and a Midi interface, all built into one neat package. Previously any one of those items may have cost £50 or more; now all are in the Music Machine for £49.95.

The hardware takes the form of a sturdy little box which plugs into the computer expansion port. On its top is a sliding control - no maximum or minimum positions indicated and at the rear you will find six sockets of various formats, all anonymous. The lack of marking is a particular nuisance with the three identical-looking DIN sockets which prove to be In, Out and Thru Midi connectors for linking the Music Machine to synthesisers and other electronic instruments.

A clever lug prevents you plugging-in the interface when the Spectrum power lead is in place. In theory, once the interface and power supply are connected you load the software and away you go. When we first plugged-in the Music Machine, the Spectrum keyboard went dead. It transpires that our Spectrum was one of a small number which seem to have sub-specification microprocessors. Normally that does not matter but the Music Machine reaches parts of the processor other packages do not, hence the deceased keyboard. If you find you have this problem, Ram Electronics will replace your faulty processor.

SOMETHING ODD

With a new processor in place, the software loaded perfectly to reveal a main menu offering some 14 options. They are selected by pressing a captialised letter - not necessarily the first letter - for each choice. Pressing "P" for Play or "M" for Midi seems natural but there is something odd about pressing "O" for piano or "H" for ecHo. A word of warning - avoid the "I" button or you will find yourself irretrievably in basic! Most menu choices take you to other screens, which appear and disappear agreeably by wiping sideways on and off the display. The one exception is "Play", which initiates whatever tune is stored in memory without abandoning the main menu.

Also on the main screen is a list of up to eight "samples" stored in the micro memory. If you have not encountered sampling previously, it is a technique for storing real sounds digitally in memory. The sounds can later be played back like a tape recorder.

When the Music Machine software is first loaded, the memory is filled with seven percussive samples and one bland instrumental noise called "synth". The total time available in memory for all the samples is slightly more than one second, so each of the eight samples lasts about 0.15 sec. That is sufficient for short percussive sounds but cannot cope adequately with sounds like piano notes, which take several seconds to die away.

The limited life of the samples can be heard most clearly when you select the Drums screen. It allocates each of a cluster of QWERTY keys to a different sample. Tap the key and the sample sounds. For some sounds, such as the pair of tom-toms, the short time-span is no problem but others, such as the cowbell, have a definite clipped feel to them.

TUNE EDITOR

That limitation becomes less important when the samples are combined into rhythmic patterns in the Drum Rhythm Editor section of the program. There up to three samples can be made to sound simultaneously by placing marks corresponding to each sample on horizontal lines representing a bar of music. The bars can be given names and numbers and, by moving to another screen called the Tune editor, can be strung together to form songs.

On the Tune editor screen one encounters one of the slightly confusing aspects of the Music Machine. In addition to stringing together the drum patterns created using the Drum Rhythm Editor, you can also string together bars of music created on yet another screen called the Bar Editor. To add to the confusion, you must choose on yet another screen, called Midi, whether you want to listen to drums or music; you cannot do both simultaneously.

The essential difference between Drums and Music is that while both use the same sampled sounds from the micro memory, the Drums mode plays them back at the speed they were recorded, whereas the Music mode plays them back at varying speeds to alter their pitch. Thus, in the Music mode you can thus play a tune with any of the samples, even percussive sounds, although the results are not always particularly musical.

The advantage of the Drums mode is that three samples can be played simultaneously.

In the Music mode only one samples can be heard most although that sample can play simultaneously at two different pitches in some circumstances. So you see what I mean by confusing?

The Bar editor is the Music mode equivalent of the Drum Rhythm editor in the Drums mode. This screen uses a slightly unconventional musical notation to place notes on a conventional treble and bass stave. Instead of the usual blobs, bar-shaped notes are placed on the stave lines - or spaces - like beads on a string. Only one note length is available and you are limited to a choice of eight, 12 or 16 beats in a bar.

As with the Rhythm editor, you compose one bar at a time and move to the Tune editor screen to string together the bars into a tune. Two notes, the same sample at two different pitches, can play simultaneously. That is double the number of notes which can be played on most other micro-based sampling systems.

IMAGINARY PIANO

A screen called Piano turns 13 of the QWERTY keys into an octave of a piano keyboard. Only one note can sound at a time when playing this imaginary piano. The only way to play two notes simultaneously in real-time is to have an external Midi keyboard plugged into the Midi in socket of the Music Machine.

As well as playing with the samples provided with the Music Machine, you can make your own. The Sampler screen is the most colourful of a rather drab collection. It has a green/yellow/red sound level meter like those found in hi-fi equipment. As you make noises into the microphone provided with the Machine, the colourful bar moves back and forth. That permits you to set up a level for recording your sample.

Before you proceed, however, you have to make space for the sample in the micro memory by deleting one or more of the existing samples after you have saved them for later use. The more old samples you dispose of, the longer your new sample can be. To record, you press T for trigger and make your noise.

You then proceed to a Sample Editor screen where you can tidy your sample. Quiet or unwanted sections can be removed from the start or end of the sample and the memory that frees is then available for further samples. The Editor gives an oscilloscope-like display of the sampled sound and you can zoom into tiny segments for precise editing or mere curiosity. It is interesting, for example, to see how short a musical sample can be before it loses its identity and becomes a noise.

The final screen, other than one dedicated to loading and saving, produces echo effects. More precisely it delays the sound received from the microphone by a variable amount. The original, undelayed sound is not fed to the output, so you do not get a true echo effect, but it is fun nonetheless.

FUN THE KEY

Fun is, indeed, the key to the Music Machine. There are several omissions about which one could quibble if it was just a sampler, a drum machine, or a Midi interface. If you are particularly interested in one of these functions, it might be better to buy a dedicated package but if you are happy messing about with sounds without worrying too much about their quality. you cannot go wrong with the Music Machine, especially at its price.

Ram Electronics is talking about offering additional software packages for the interface which might delve deeper into the Midi potential but exploring the possibilities of the existing software package will keep you busy for some time.

RAY ELDER ENTHUSES ABOUT THE POTENTIAL OF RAM 'S NEW COMPREHENSIVE MUSICAL ADD-ON.

Ram Electronics
£49.95

This smallish uninteresting looking black plastic box is perhaps the most powerful, versatile and exciting peripheral that I have had the pleasure to review for ages!

Described as 'The Complete Home Computer Music System' I consider this claim to be a modest appraisal of the unit. It could be used in professional applications as well. So what does it do?

AT HOME

The great majority of purchasers will go for its superb sampled drum sounds and built in sequencer allowing complex and carefully constructed patterns to be created bar by bar and linked together to form a complete song.

A very versatile unit the quality and flexibility of which is equal to the £250+ Yamaha dedicated RX21 that I use. On the plus side is the fact that each bar can be set to individual tempos, not feasible with the RX. But there is a real time play mode where your fingers can attempt to mimic Buddy Rich. On the minus side is there is no "real time" pattern constructing and only two Toms, the RX has three. However the Music Machine has Cowbell and the RX hasn't.

But this does not matter!

If you want another Tom then you can have it, or remove the cowbell or any of the sounds and replace them with any other you fancy because the Music Machine is also a Sampler! This means that you can record digitally any sound you like via the cheap microphone supplied, tape or line out of an amplifier.

Once a sound is in memory then you can set the start and end parameters and play as much or as little of it as you wish, even looping it for continuous sustain. You can reverse it and play it backwards, interesting, or go to the "piano" screen and play it back over a 12 note, one octave range rising from middle C.

Once you have exhausted the novelty of that then you can use the tune sequencer and play it over a much extended three octave range and in two parts. It is here that some of the limitations of an inexpensive unit may become audible, the sustain effect is played by a very fast staccato repeat and it can be heard as such, also the tone may become unpleasant in the extremes of the range. A £10,000+ Fairllght allows multi samples across the whole range to be taken so what can you ask of a unit such as this?

For technicrats the sampling rate is 19.444KHz and this gives approx 1.1 secs, it sounds short, but in fact it gives plenty of time to say "Samantha Fox" (should you so wish). A start and end of a sustain loop within the sample feature would have been useful, and the enlarged display of the waveform often resembles a burst from an airbrush and this is a pity.

The rear of the unit bristles with sockets and the three which most owners will use are the microphone IN, the Phono OUT to an amplifier or stereo and a Headphone for personal listening. Only the output from either the tune sequencer or the drum sequencer can be sent to the headphone or phono socket at any one time.

Not just simply a fascinating toy as are most of the samplers I have seen, including some made well respected companies in this field, but actually usable to create genuine musical compositions.

For anyone with musical interests this is an absolutely essential piece of equipment. I've heard 'Rap' records with less backing than this can produce, and the quality is good enough for studio use.

MIDI

Should you be one of the growing number of serious home musicians who own a keyboard such as the Casio CZ101 or any of the other instruments fitted with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) then you can greatly extend both units' use.

There are three MIDI sockets fitted, standard five pin DIN, for MIDI IN, OUT and THROUGH and via these you can either play your sampled sounds over the full keyboard range, sync with external sequencers, play the Music Machine's sequencer out to the keyboard (at the same time as using the drums via the headphone or phono out) or any other combination you desire. This is possible from the software which operates in both the common Omni and Poly modes allowing full channel assignment and internal or external clock control.

EASY USE

All this in one unit and program must make it complicated to run.

Not a bit! The manual is written to suit all abilities, step by step chatty approach throughout but with full technical detail for those with deeper understanding - something many of the dedicated "professional" units I've looked at do not usually give.

As for operating, the menu system has been carefully designed with many options being consistent whether you are you are in the Sampler, Piano, Midi, Echo or any of the many other operating screens. You soon learn the essential commands and the others are nearly all self evident.

I am afraid this review is rather on the enthusiastic side, but then I have deliberately compared this unit with others of much higher price and it holds its own. A simple MIDI interface by itself can cost over £100, this has much, much more to offer.

RAM ask for ideas, there is no limit when you consider MIDI, for example how about; A real time multitrack sequencer with auto correct and variable quantize, or a multitrack step time sequencer, both with high resolution printout facilities, or a midi patchbay system (give me a unit and I'll write one of those!) or, or.... the list is vast indeed.

Yes, you may say, but it'll cost the earth and be well out of my reach. I agree it is a little more than the average £15-£30 interface but at an astounding £49.95 it offers incredible value for money, the chance for anyone with an interest in music to get into the latest hi-tec musical development and I have no hesitation in giving it the highest accolade possible from a hard bitten, cynical reviewer.