Friday, March 30, 2018

French Translation

Christian, one of our French speaking users, has been busy the last while translating the MMA manual to his native language. And, in true open source style, is sharing his work with all of us. 

It is free to download from his archive at:

    http://linuxmao.org//tiki-list_file_gallery.php?galleryId=29 

Christian is asking for you help. If you can do some proof reading it would be a great help. Please contact him directly via: cg.clarinette35@laposte.net

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

MMA is over 15 years old

I was just looking at some files and noticed that the first beta release of MMA was posted in February 2003. That means that we missed celebrating the birthday of our adolescent program.  But, considering that this is the first day or spring, please raise a glass of your favorite fruit wine to our friend.

Friday, March 9, 2018

New developer version 16.06.b available

Harmonies are done! And a new developer version is now available. Get it at:

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

The biggest change is the addition of interval harmonies. These can be quite useful, but be careful ... they can be quite ugly as well.

I've changed the syntax a bit from the discussions here by forcing all interval harmonies to include a single ":" in their name. See the fine documentation for details.

In addition, there are a number of bug fixes (as always) and a number of documentation improvements.

Have fun. And don't forget to let me know if any of this is useful, your suggestions for improvement, neat grooves you have written, and any bugs you might find.

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Harmony, revisited

One of these days I will learn to leave things alone :) But what would the fun in that be?

I have dumped the Perfect4 harmony out.

And replaced it with a comprehensive set of interval harmonies. So, now, in addition to the OpenAbove, etc. chord based harmonies that have been in MMA just about forever, we now have an interval notation:

      S[octave]Interval

The octave modifier can be any value between -4 and 4.

The interval can be any of Unison, MinorSecond ... PerfectFourth ... etc. And, of course, these can be shorten to Min2 ... Per4, etc.

The leading S is supposed to signify that this is an interval, not chord based. I'm not sure I like S, but using an I is just ugly and confusing with the digit 1. So, I'm suggesting S for "scalar".

I think I might also include a "C" option: just indicate the exact number of half steps to use. Again, I'm not sure about "C" since someone might think that it means "chord". Hmmm, maybe "H" for halfsteps?

I've run a few tests and the harmonies generated this way really don't sound as bad as I thought they would ... some, of course, are awful. But, some are quite pleasing.

A beta release is coming soon. Promise :)

 I've been pretty neglectful in keeping this blog up-to-date. Lots of excuses ... but, I'll try to do a bit better! There is a new b...