Freestyle.

No, Freestyle is not a swimming style, but it could well have you playing different strokes! The documentation describes it as an arranger program. It can effectively turn a Midi instrument into a portable keyboard, one of those all singin', all dancin' machines with built in drums which produce rhythm, bass and chord accompaniment patterns. In this respect it is similar to Band-In-A-Box (reviewed in ST User December '90) but Freestyle is rather more powerful and sophisticated.
The packaging is very impressive. It comes in a classy document case which, I am sure, will be in great demand by other members of the family if you don't nail it down! There's a note pad and a pencil inside along with some instruction booklets and a couple of disks. The program comes on a copy protected disk so although you can copy the files to a hard disk, the original disk must be in the drive on booting. Darn nuisance.
There's a "quick start" sheet (which you will later learn has been lifted directly from the tutorial section of the manual) which will, in fact, get some sort of sound out of your keyboard but it doesn't say a word about having to set the Midi channels so the resulting sound is most unlikely to he what you expect. It suffers a little from Germenglish, too.
The main manual also has a smattering of Germenglish but the UK distributors have thoughtfully included a UK User Guide to help you along. However, it is meant to be used in conjunction with the main manual and is heavily cross-indexed with it so you will find yourself flicking from one to the other. The very first step has got to be to get the Midi channels on your equipment and in the program to match but this isn't dealt with until halfway through the manual.
Freestyle is of German origin but as it is being sold in the UK, is it asking too much to have a single, comprehensive English instruction manual, written in English, for English users? Freestyle is by no means the worst culprit - once you get into it, it's easy to understand -but poor manuals are really starting to bug me. Am I being unreasonable?
Anyway, back to the plot. Having made such a fuss about setting up sounds and Midi channels, let's see exactly how you go about it. The Midi setup defaults to Roland's MT-32, a de facto standard which has been widely adopted by many Midi song arrangers and other music programs which use drum maps and which rely on particular sounds. Drum maps are also supplied for the Korg Mi/Ti, the Proteus and Yamaha's SY77 and RX drum machines.
If you have something else, it's easy to change the Midi note numbers assigned to each drum although it would have been even easier if you could do this by tapping the keys on a Midi keyboard. The default sound map follows the MT-32 sounds, too, and an additional map for Roland's E 20 is supplied. Again, the map is easy to edit to suit other equipment and you can load new sound names, too. These, however, have to be created with a text editor.

Parameters
Midi setup is where you, er, set up the Midi parameters. These include the Midi channel which each part transmits on, plus a thru channel for a melody line should you want to play along with the accompaniments. You can decide whether Clock Start and Stop messages should be send -to trigger an external drum machine or sequencer - and you can even elect to control the program with program change numbers.
Let's now get down to the nitty gritty, Freestyle can produce five-part accompaniments - drums, bass and three rhythmic parts. The main screen is well laid out. An information bar below the menu shows the amount of free memory in your ST, the Arrange mode (coming up), tempo, time signature, bar position, song name and the page number and name. Songs are arranged in pages, each one holding up to 48 chords. These occupy most of the screen.
On the left is a style box which can hold up to eight styles which are resident in memory. Below this is the Midi Mixer which gives you control over various parameters of the five parts and below that are the playback controls.
An entry in a page takes the form of a chord name in a box surrounded by other bits of information. Freestyle recognises 13 chord types. In the top left of the box is the part type. There are six of these - original, variation, fill in moving to original pattern, fill in moving to variation pattern, intro and ending. These are represented by three4etter abbreviations although they could have been increased to six letters without any loss of clarity. To the right of this is the style number, one to eight, which corresponds to one of the eight styles in the style box.
The bottom of the entry shows which instruments are set to play -drums, bass and accompaniments one, two and three. These are represented by the letters d and b and the numbers one to three.
You can alter the chord name and type, as well as the part and style number of an entry, simply by clicking on them. The instruments, however, must be muted or unmuted by clicking on them in the Midi Mixer. Here you can also enter a program change number, set the playback velocity and transpose the instrument up or down an octave. This can be useful for bass parts if the bass sound on your instrument Is too high or too low, It's also useful If the accompaniments of two consecutive chords are an octave apart.
For example, the program's Internal split point occurs between G and G# and there's a distinctly audible octave leap in the accompaniments if you play these two chords (or A to G, for example) consecutively. Oddly, you can also transpose the drum channel although this can lead to interesting results. As each transposition applies to just a single entry, it could be useful.
You build up a song in pages. For convenience you may arrange a single page to hold the chords for an intro, verse, chorus, middle eight and so on. Freestyle can hold up to 100 pages - memory permitting - which can each be named.
You add chord entries to the page and set their various parameters. Each entry can be a whole bar or half a bar - there's no provision for making a chord occupy a single beat although you could reduce the time signature to 2/4 from 4/4, for example.

Variation
A single song can use up to eight styles so the potential for variety and variation is considerable. You can create and hold up to 10 songs In memory at the same time. You can select any one for playing but this requires use of the mouse and the keyboard.
When entering chords into the program in this way, Freestyle is in Leadsheet Arrange mode. There are actually two Leadsheet modes - Loop and Song - and these are shown in the Arrange window. As you can probably guess, Loop keeps repeating the song, while Song plays it through once.
In Midi Arrange mode, Freestyle can turn a synthesiser Into a portable keyboard. You form the accompanying chords in the lower half of the keyboard and play the melody in the upper half. If you use Freestyle's Midi Thru it's advisable to set the keyboard to Local Off. A Double Voice option adds an octave to the lead sound to thicken it - works better than Bisto -and you can transpose it up or down by one or two octaves. You can select the style part using the functions keys or the mouse.
There are several options here to control your playing. You can determine when a chord change will take place with times ranging from instant to waiting until the start of the next bar. This lets you set the rate of change to match your playing style and ability.
A quick transpose option will switch off all notes and immediately transpose them allowing effects like chord changes on the upbeat (although the success of this function depends on the chord "delay" value and the chords played).
Velocity Switch is neat. If you play harder on the keyboard (the level is definable) you can trigger a fill leading to the variation of the pattern. A second trigger will take you back to the original pattern. There's even a sync start function which will begin playback when you play the first chord.

Clever
You can use Midi controllers such as pitch bend and modulation on playback and the Human Touch option will apply random velocity levels to drum sounds you have selected in the drum map.
You can use the Midi Arrange mode to enter chords Into the Leadsheet. The currently selected style, part type, chord and Midi setup (in the Midi Mixer) will be transferred to the currently selected entry when you go back to Song or Loop mode. You can use the program without a monitor for live use, for example, but rather you than me.
I suppose you want to know what the styles are like. Well, they really are rather excellent. Fight styles are on the program disk and another 32 styles are supplied on a second disk. The patterns range from Quicksteps and Foxtrots to Europop, Acid, Funk and Disco.
The state-of-the-art in auto accompaniment patterns is probably represented by Roland's E series of keyboards, the latest models being the E-70 (1,299), FM35 (899) and E15 (499). Now while Freestyle doesn't quite come up to the standard of the E accompaniments, they do stand up for themselves very well indeed.
If you bear the price in mind they really are difficult to fault and, in fact, I wouldn't try. You won't be disappointed. The quality of the sounds in your musical equipment has a bearing on the quality of the accompaniments, too, and that's worth hearing in mind.
The adventurous can create their own styles although to do this you need a sequencer which can write Midi standard files in format 1. A style consists of a 13-track sequence containing the various drum parts plus major, minor and seventh variations for the bass and the three accompaniment parts.
There are specific rules you must follow such as starting and separating the drum sections with a C-2 note and starting the accompaniment sections with a program change. Once you've created a Midi file, Freestyle's Generate Style option is used to turn it into a style the program can read.
Freestyle can run under C-Lab's Softlink with Creator or Notator - you'll need at least 2Mb of RAM -which is an excellent software combination if you want to create your own styles. I suspect that Notator was used to create the styles supplied with the program.
Although you do need an additional piece of software - a sequencer - to create your own styles, it's a far better method than that used by Band-In-A-Box, although no doubt the cynics will say that if you can create styles as good as Freestyle's, you don't need the program anyway.
Having created a song and tweaked it to your heart's content, you can save it in Midi file format for loading into a standard sequencer.
Niggles are basically small. Some are to do with implementation - it would be nice if the screen updated to show exactly what time signature and style are currently playing, for example. Redrawing the chord entries can seem slow when you're in a hurry. Other niggles are having to use both mouse and keyboard for some functions.
Four songs are supplied with Freestyle. More would have been nice along with a few more styles although I'd be very surprised if additional style disks don't soon become available (although no doubt at a price).
If you like Band-In-A-Box you'll love this as Zone has a special upgrade deal for Band' owners. Its uses range from providing accompaniments for song writers to creating backing tracks for singers doing self-contained club and pub work -I still say Keep Music Live! - and if arranging isn't your strong suit it could be the answer to your prayers.
It's also fun and that's part of what music is all about.

Atari ST User February 1992
