Creating Effects

It's really quite amazing how easy and effective it is to create different patterns, sequences and special effects. As MMA was developed lots of silly things were tried ... this chapter is an attempt to display and preserve some of them.

The examples don't show any music to apply the patterns or sequences to. The manual assumes that if you've read this far you'll know that you should have something like:

1 C
2 G
3 G
4 C

as a simple test piece to apply tests to.

Overlapping Notes

As a general rule, you should not create patterns in which notes overlap. However, here's an interesting effect which relies on ignoring that rule:

Begin Scale
    define S1 1 1+1+1+1 90
    define S32 S1 * 32
    Sequence S32
    ScaleType
    Direction Both
    Voice Accordion
    Octave 5
End

“S1” is defined with a note length of 4 whole notes (1+1+1+1) so that when it is multiplied for S32 a pattern of 32 8th notes is created. Of course, the notes overlap. Running this up and down a chromatic scale is “interesting”. You might want to play with this a bit and try changing “S1” to:

define S1 1 1 90

to see what the effect is of the notes overlapping.

Jungle Birds

Here's another use for SCALEs. Someone (certainly not the author) decided that some jungle sounds would be perfect as an introduction to “Yellow Bird”.

groove Rhumba
Begin Scale
    define S1 1 1 90
    define S32 S1 * 32
    Sequence S32
    ScaleType Chromatic
    Direction Random
    Voice BirdTweet
    Octave 5 6 4 5
    RVolume 30
    Rtime 2 3 4 5
    Volume pp pp ppp ppp
End
DefGroove BirdRhumba

The above is an extract from the MMA score. The entire song is included in the “songs” directory of this distribution.

A neat trick is to create the bird sound track and then add it to the existing Rhumba groove. Then define a new groove. Now one can select either the library “rhumba” or the enhanced “BirdRhumba” with a simple GROOVE directive.