Quarter tone support

I had a request the other day about quarter tone support. Quarter tones are (mostly) used in middle eastern music and are very interesting.

The problem with them is that the western instruments we are used to just don't really support them. Well, MMA to the rescue ... well, sort of.

I hacked out a little plugin which takes a standard Solo RIFF line and parses it into separate tracks with the quarter tones in their own track. Then, during play, the quarter tone track is adjusted.

Using multiple tracks, with some detuned, permits this to work on the majority of existing synths. Even cooler is that it's yet another example of plugins in action.

This is not a finished project. More a proof of concept than anything else. I'm hoping that the fellow who made the original request will run with the code and make really useful. If one of you want to work on this I can put you in touch.

New version 15.12.c

Okay testers! I've finally gotten the new test version up for you. This version has the AFTER command which lets you set a command line for future execution. If you use macros to set your melodies you'll find this handy.

The version also introduces new bugs while fixing others :)

Get it at: http://mellowood.ca/mma/downloads.html#developer

AFTER docs

Wrote some docs for the AFTER command. I think they even make sense!

Having a bit of lunch now and then I'm going into town to do some street playing on my saxophone. Fun.

Will review the docs and example files tomorrow and hopefully get a developer tarball put together then.

Changed AfterBars to just "After"

So nice to have all my stuff running again. The "server is gone" was just one of many tech issues I had to deal with over the last few weeks. Hopefully, that was the end and I can just enjoy the rest of 2016. Yeah ... right.

I got a bit of time today to play with the AFTEBARS command. I've decided to change the name of the command to just AFTER. Not only is it shorter, but it makes more grammatical sense as well. Seemed silly to have statements like "Afterbars Bars...". Plus, I'm thinking that there might be other triggering events we can add at a later date.

I've got to write some docs for this and another example. Then I'll push out a developer version.

Server down

My server host is experiencing a DDoS attack. Not just my site, but the entire site's web servers. I have no idea what the issue is ... but my site (and email) as been out of service now for a day or so.

If you have a suggestion for a low-priced web hosting alternative or if you need to contact me please send mail to bobmellowood@gmail.com

More afterbars

Finally found a bit of time to work on this some more :)

I think we're going to change the command name to "trigger" to keep it consistent with the existing track-trigger stuff. I'm also thinking that keyword options will be:

     Trigger AT=xx   CMD.. /// do at specified bar
     Trigger After=xx  CMD.. /// to after xx bars
     Trigger Repeat=xx  CMD... /// do every xx bars

Multiple trigger lines are permitted, and each can have its own settings.

I don't think that every user will be using this ... but it's a simple addition and should make using melodies set in macros a bit easier.

New command: AfterBars

I've added a new command: AfterBars.

The idea is that you can set "something" to happen at some point in the future.

For example, you might want to print a message to the terminal every 10 bars (nope, no idea why you'd want to do this). Or, more usefully, you may have set a song (or part) into a macro and want to change the volume of this after a few bars. So, you can now do something like:

   Mset  Melody
       C
       D
       .... more chord lines
   EndMset

And expand this melody a number of times:

    $Melody
    $Melody

and now, for the final loop, we change the volume after 4 more bars:

     AfterBars Count=4 Volume pp

And, now the command becomes cool.

You can even set a specific bar number (Bar=32) or repeat the command every nn bars.

I need to work on this a bit more and debug the line number settings before we get too excited. But, this will find itself into the next developer release. Hopefully, next week.

Standby :)