

Musically inept? Tone deaf? Why not try John the Composer, and let your ST do the creating for you? Ian Waugh investigates
Johnny Be Goode
John the Composer is one of the most intriguing composition programs to hit the ST for quite a while. It generates four-part compositions - drums, bass, chords and melody line - with or without your help! You don't even need a Midi instrument although the output is much better if you use a synth.
The program breaks the music parameters down into sections. Each of the four music ports has at least two parameters - syncopation and note amount. These are represented on-screen by a line in the edit window.
The higher the syncopation line, for example, the more notes will appear on the offbeat. The higher the line in the note amount window, the more notes will sound.


CHORD PARAMETERS

The chord part has two other parameters - change amount and cadence amount. Change controls how often the chords change, cadence determines how far they move from the home key.
The melody part has a movement parameter which sets the difference between the highest and lowest points of the melody.
You can set all these parameters by drawing lines into the edit window so even if you don't understand music you can control how busy the parts are and how they progress over time.
And you can pass control over to John. The more control you give him, the further away from the parameters he will take the music. He will even draw the lines into the edit window for you.
There are icons at the top of the screen for each of the music parts and clicking on these makes John instantly recompose that section. You can select the chords which the program will use and weigh them according to how often you want them to occur.
There are many other parameters you can adjust, too. For example, you can specify how closely the melody follows the chord. That is, uses the notes which are in the chord.
There's also a repetivity parameter which is a clever idea and one which plays an important part in the progression of the music. The concept takes a little wrapping your head around.
Essentially, it lets you specify how much repetition will occur within a particular section of music. You could, for example, make the first bar have little repetitiveness but then make subsequent bars follow what repetitiveness there was to a greater or lesser degree. The settings are easy to tweak but the outcome is not always easy to predict.
Music has structured sections such as intro, verse, chorus, coda and so on. John lets you define four music sections - intro, A, B and coda - whose parameters include the time signature, the number of bars and how often they repeat, and whether or not the section will generate triplets.
There is a subscreen here which lets you experiment with even more complex structures and note durations.
If you want a fairly normal drum track it's a good idea to restrict the drum parameters otherwise it can sound like Cozy Powell on happy pills.
It's also a good idea to work on one section of the composition at a time so you aren't distracted by the other sections. Unfortunately, you can't change parameters on the fly.
When you and John have composed a few pieces you can save different styles into different folders. John can look into a folder and take the styles there on board for the current composition session.
The program looks quite complex but it's quite easy to use. However, you may have to spend a little time getting to grips with some of the concepts. The manual could be more helpful here. It contains some linguistic oddities and needs some worked examples. There were only two demo files on the disk -there really should be more.
So what does John sound like? With careful setting up he can produce rock/pop rhythms but he finds it difficult to produce the highly stylised melodies prevalent in modern music, which is fair. After all, if you wrote a program to produce pop songs, would you sell it?
But John does have moments of inspiration and you can save the music as a Midi file to load into your own sequencer. In fact, this is how it is best used. If you're interested in computer composition, John's your man!

FEATURES

Lots of parameters to tweak which really do give you control over the music.

EASE OF USE

You can use John even it you don't know much about music.

VALUE FOR MONEY
Excellent One of the cheapest composition programs for the ST.

Atari ST User July 1993
