I felt great today!

So, here I was ... just minding my own. Doing a bit of email, etc. and I got a phone call. Nice, elderly lady looked up my number and told me that she'd finally decided to give me a call. She'd purchased one of my CDs, mellowood.ca/music/cedars/index.html five or more years ago at an art show and really needed to let me know how much she still enjoyed it. I could hear it playing in the background. During our brief conversation I thought she was going to break down into tears.

The CD was done as a test of MMA! All the backgrounds, 100%, were done with MMA. All I had to do was write the melodies, play the saxophone, record and mix it all. The simple stuff :)

Made me feel pretty darn good knowing that this little test could bring such joy into someone's life!

New Developer Version 16.06.a

I've posted mma-16.06.a on the download site. A few features I'm sure "someone" will like:

 - The AFTER option parser now permits option pairs in the command to execute properly.

 - DefaultDrum now sets up solo/melody tracks as
      well as drums. I've spent quite of time debugging this apparently simple fix. Please let me know if get it to crash!

 - The plain old #5 for a major chord no longer works (well, it didn't before!). Please use (#5), + or aug.

As always, you can get this at:

 http://mellowood.ca/mma/downloads.html#developer

Have fun!

Drum Voice

I've added the following to the docs for setting a voice in a drum track to the manual: 

All DRUM tracks share a common MIDI channel. This, for all practical purposes, means that all DRUM tracks will have the same VOICE or "drum kit''. In most cases, it is recommended that you use the VOICE command only in the generic track "Drum''. At this point, MMA doesn't enforce this recommendation. 

Hopefully this will eliminate some confusion.

Different Ways to do Things

It always surprises me how different folks use different methods to do the same thing.

I had some discussions the other day with a fellow who was using MELODY tracks to create drum patterns. And, this actually makes perfect sense. He gets to use a sheet music-like notation instead of defining SEQUENCES. Of course, using the notation for Melody/Solo one loses the ease of using different velocities, repetitive patterns, etc.

But, it sure is cool to know that people are doing things completely different from anything I imagined. Let me know if you're breaking or bending the rules.