Getting Started --------------- Blahtune has a tremendous number of features to it, which can be quite overwhelming. The majority of these features however are not necessary for composing some tunes, which is after all the purpose of the program! This document serves as an introduction to Blahtune and the basic components; for the more advanced features, the reference manual, not to mention the quick reference, should be consulted. Designing an instrument ----------------------- A song isn't much without an instrument, so that's a good place to start: press F3 to enter the instrument editor. This is where instruments are designed (naturally!) -- in fact it just lets you play around with SID, and see+hear the result. To get started, use the cursor keys to move down to "sustain", and use the +/- keys to select a sustain value of 15. Then use the cursor keys to move over to the sawtooth waveform, and press the space bar to select it. Press 'g' to toggle the gate bit, which turns the note on. Uh-oh, no sound is being generated! That is probably because the frequency is set to zero: move down to "frequency" and using shift + or shift - try increasing the frequency -- voila! Once you've got a sound you like, press "Shift-s" to save the instrument. Save this one as instrument 0. Up to 14 instruments may be designed in this way. Now it's time to write a song! Using the music editor ---------------------- To enter the music editor, press F1. The three columns are of course the music data fields for voice 1, voice 2, and voice 3. The cursor keys are used to navigate. It's awfully nice to be able to actually hear music when its being played, so the player ought to be told to turn up the volume. Press shift-w to select a "set volume" instruction. The cursor should be flashing in the action box, waiting for you to enter a number. Enter "15", or just press return to accept the default value of 15. Now press return again, to add another line. The voice could really use an instrument, and that one just designed will do nicely. Press shift-i to set an instrument, and enter "0" as the instrument number. There should now be two instructions on the screen -- SEV (set volume) and LIN (load instrument). Press return again -- it's time to enter in some notes. The keyboard has already been set up to enter notes in a particular way. Press "a" to select the note A, press "a#" to select an A#, and so on. After selecting a note, the action box should say "?Oct", meaning it is waiting for you to enter an octave. Enter an octave between 0 and 7 -- 2 or 3 is a good octave. Finally, you need to enter in a duration. I have set it up so that "1" corresponds to whole notes, "2" corresponds to half notes, "4" corresponds to quarter notes, and so on. Press one of the number keys -- "4" is a good choice. Plop! The editor should insert a line and move you on to it. If you think three keys per note is rather a lot, you are right. At any time you can hit RETURN or any other editing key to move onwards; the + and - keys can come in pretty handy here too (see the quick reference and manual for more details though). After entering in a few other notes, the field needs to be ended. Either press "shift-s" to enter a "stop" code, or press "shift-z" to enter a "restart player" code (I recommend shift-z). If all is well, the moment of truth has arrived: press CTRL-p to play the song! Press CTRL-p again to stop the song. CTRL-p always plays the song from the very beginning. Naturally, the cursor keys are used to navigate around the field data. There are some other useful editing features, such as cut+paste (using C=-x, C=-c, and C=-p), paging (using '<' and '>', and C=-'<' C='>'), and bookmarks (press HOME to set a bookmark, and C=-HOME to go to the bookmark). Insert and delete work just about like you'd expect them to! Just entering notes is OK, but to access the real power of the player macros are needed. Macro Manager ------------- What are macros exactly? Macros are little programs which are written and then compiled, which can then be called by the player to modify the sound, or to talk to outside programs, and things like that. Lucky for you I have included some sample macros on disk, so there isn't any need to go writing them. From the macro manager, press F7 to access the disk menu. Load the file called "samplemac.bun". If all goes well, you will be back in the macro manager, and several names will be printed on the screen -- these are macros. If you would like to see what a macro looks like, select on with the cursor and press RETURN -- this will put you in the text editor. To exit the editor, press either RUN/STOP or C=-x. Before being used, macros must be compiled. From the macro manager, press "c" to compile all macros. If all goes well a "compilation successful" message will appear -- the macros are now a part of the music player! To see how macros are used, we need to go back to the music player. We are going to use macro #0 (Vibrato 1) and macro #5 (Arpeggio 1). Press F1 to enter the music editor. Using macros ------------ Once again, the player must be told to start up a macro. Shift-l is used to activate a local macro. Until a macro is activated, it will not do anything. Once activated, it will keep on going until it is deactivated (using C=-l). First, let's try out the vibrato. Go up to some of the notes you have entered, and press INSERT to insert a new line. Press shift-l to select the "Activate local macro" instruction, and enter 0 as the macro number. The message bar should now read "Activate local Vibrato 1". Now try playing the song again, using CTRL-p, and listen to what happens! Now let's try a more sophisticated macro: an arpeggio. Use the cursor keys to move to the "Activate local Vibrato 1" line. Multiple macros can be active at the same time, but for now we're just going to have one. Press shift-l to activate a local macro, and this time enter 5 as the macro number. The message bar will read "Activate local Arpeggio 1". Press RETURN to add a new line. The arpeggio macro needs a parameter passed to it. Specifically, we need to tell the player to load a specific value into a certain variable. Press shift-v (the v is for "variable") -- the action box will change to read "?Var#". Press 7, and the message bar should now read "L7=0", which means "Load local variable L7 with the value 0". This is the *default* value, but not the one we want. That cursor flashing in the action box means the editor is waiting for some input -- enter in "4" and press return. The message bar should now read "L7=4". At the risk of being pedantic, this tells the player to load the local variable L7 with the value 4. The Arpeggio macro looks to this value to determine the speed of the arpeggio -- lower values are faster. Now press CTRL-p again to try it out! Cool, huh! Try different values for the speed, and see what happens. Saving and playing a tune ------------------------- From the editor, press F7 to access the disk menu. From here you can load and save tunes. Once a tune is saved, it can be played from outside the editor. From BASIC, you can just load it up ,8,1 and type SYS 4102. To play a tune from ML, see the reference manual (or playvars). Getting Adventurous ------------------- Once you become familiar with the basics, there are lots of things to do. Take a glance at the quick reference, and try a command! You can edit the note and duration tables using CTRL-n and CTRL-d, respectively. If you want to hear notes as you enter them, use CTRL-a. From the macro manager, you might try editing one of the macros, or writing your own. Finally, if you're feeling really, REALLY adventurous... you could (gulp!) read the manual!