



SCORPION SYSTEMS SYBIL
PERFORMANCE SOFTWARE
(MAC, ATARI ST, IBM)

By Carter Scholz

ONE DRUMMER, ONE ROLAND OCtapad, one tone module, one Mac. The drummer is laying down a basic backbeat on a couple of pads, triggering drum sounds. He hits a new pad and a bass comes in. Another pad triggers a sustained horn chord. Wait a minute - how is he playing a bass line on just one pad? And now it sounds like there's a guitar playing lead. He's wailing away on all eight pads, and it sounds like a one-man fusion band. What's he doing - triggering sequences from the Mac? Running an algorithmic composer?
Nope, he's using sYbil, realtime performance-enhancing software for the Mac, Atari ST and IBM. sYbil (named after the woman with the multiple personalities) is a very slick, well-wrought tool that defies easy categorization. Its most immediate appeal will be to drummers, but it's general enough to interest any MIDI player with an emphasis on "player.".
Technically, sYbil is an interactive MIDI mapper. That means it receives MIDI input, and produces altered MIDI output. The user creates "identity maps" that determine which notes are altered and how. sYbil responds to note-ons only, on one channel only, and can map a maximum of 16 keys or drum pads (I'll just say "keys" from here on). This may seem parsimonious, but sYbil is a performing tool, not a general-purpose mapper. Given the kinds of things sybil is meant for, 16 keys is just about right.
The first layer of sYbil's personalities is the so-called "identity maps." Each of the 16 keys can be programmed to trigger up to four MIDI notes at a time. At the simplest level, you can have sYbil, when you hit a key, play a four voice chord. Each of the four voices can have its own MIDI channel, duration ("gate time"), and relative velocity scaling. Velocities can't be boosted, but they can be scaled down by a factor between 1% and 1 00O/o. And remember, "chord" is meant in the most general way: any four sounds that can be triggered by MIDI note-ons.
In addition, each key can be assigned to a "toggle," and here's where it starts to get interesting. A toggle key will play whatever sounds (if any) have been assigned to it, and will perform a special toggle function.
One kind of toggle lets you step through (or "chain") up to four chord maps. So every time you hit the "chain" key, a new set of 16 four-note chords becomes active. There's also a "chain reset" toggle to go back to map 1 at any time.

Another kind of toggle transposes all note assignments up or down by a given amount. If you hit the toggle repeatedly, it repeatedly transposes by the same interval. But that's not all another type of transpose toggle lets you program a series of transpositions, so every time you hit that key, the transposing interval changes to whatever is next in the series. (The series loops back to the start after its last entry.) This lets you play a programmed melody by repeatedly hitting the same key to generate a series of transpositions, which is quite slick. A "transpose reset" toggle cancels these effects.
Three types of "sustain" toggles address the problem of holding chords with a drum pad, or on the bottom strings of a guitar controller while your fingers are busy soloing on the upper strings. With the first type, each hit on the pad will sustain the next outgoing chord only, while subsequent events will be cut short. A second type sustains the chord until the following pad is hit. And a third type "hangs" the sustain through all subsequent events until you hit the same pad again.

A few more toggles round out the sYbil toolkit. "Program change" steps through a userdefi ned series of MIDI program changes. There are only four steps in the series, but each step can send program changes on all 16 MIDI channels. "Square one" returns all series, transpositions, and map chains to their starting point, and "thru" simply switches sYbil on and 0).
The final wrinkle is a velocity cross-switch. If you hit a key harder than a variable threshold, sYbil uses an alternative chord map, that is, a fifth one over and above the four maps available via chaining. The cross-switch changes the active chtrd map only, not the toggles.
A sYbil setup can be assigned to one 1-key region anywhere in your controller's MID range, or split between two eight-key regions. The keys in a region must be consecutive. My keys that are not "sybilized" pass through the program unchanged, as does other MIDI data (pitch-bend, controllers, etc.).
Only one of each toggle (there are 13 types in all) can be used in a 16-key sYbil setup. That is to say, you can't have - and don't need - more than one "chain" toggle, more than one "sustain type 1," and so on, in any sYbil setup.
If you don't have a MIDI controller, you can still use sYbil. Keys 1-8 and Q-1 of the computer keyboard can be substituted for drum pads, although of course you still need a MIDI tone module to hear the output. Last I heard, computer keyboards aren't velocity-sensitive, but sYbil allows you to get to the cross-switch map with the shift key.

Playing Along. The interface for programming sYbil is clean and simple, though on the Atari ST the method for inputting data is rather slow and clumsy. There are three screens. The "spreadsheet" is used to set up the 16-row-by. 4-column chord maps; each cell displays the note name, channel, duration, and volume. "Pad/'Key' assigns the toggles; the format of this display can be switched between that of a piano keyboard and that of a drum pad. "PC map' holds the 1 6-by4 program change map. It takes no time at all to figure out how to use the screens.
A few minor gripes. Menus pop up every-where to ease data entry, which is very nice, but one menu ("gate time," measured in 6Oths of a second) has over a hundred entries, and it takes quite a while to scroll from one end of it to the other. Entering notes into the chord maps is done by clicking notes ona little on-screen clavier; it would be nicer if you could just hit the MIDI key or pad. Entering values into the transpose toggles is done by typing in a string of positive/negative numbers separated by commas-functional, but a tad on-friendly, especially when there's a perfectly good "transpose" pop-up menu on the next page.

But there's nothing daunting about the mechanics of sYbil setups.  What you're setting up is tougher to figure. At first, it's not at all obvious which toggles you should use, or even how chords should be configured, for a specific effect.  The manual, while it could be better organized, is short enough (41 half-size pages), and sYbil is simple enough, that you can get the gist without undue thumbing. The brief tutorials help some - a few more wouldn't hurt - but the best teacher is experience.
Start with the demo files. They're set up for a Roland MT-32 or an E-mu Proteus, but you can modify them to work with similar sounds on other modules. A sYbil "identity" is very dependent on the voices and notes it's set up to trigger, so take your time and choose the correct sounds. A multitimbral tone module is highly recommended. (By the way, sYbil is at its flashiest spitting out multitimbral chords, and it eats up voices fast. One Octapad can use up an MT-32.)
Once the proper sounds are set up, hit your way through a couple of demos. When making up your own maps, keep it simple at first - sign just one note per key, with each note sent to a different channel/voice. Then start assigning toggles. Go slow, and try to guess what each key will do before you hit it.
Quick notes and tips: The transpose toggles, especially the series, are very powerful, and if you're running several you can get lost. Remember that they transpose everything, including stuff like drum sets that you may not want transposed. Chains are effective for making big, sectional shifts in material, but can be just as handy on a smaller scale. The resets are invaluable, not just for finding your way back to square one, but for structuring a piece. In the time I had, I didn't find any revolutionary uses for sYbil's program changes, and the sustain toggles got in my way more often than not; they're obviously indispensable for a drummer, but my fingers have their own ideas about how to sustain notes, and they didn't take to retraining.
sYbil's MIDI response is fast. When playing straight into it from a MID keyboard, we couldn't make it choke. A note of caution, however: When sYbil (either the Atari version or the Mac version) was presented with the output of an Anatek Pocket Merge, it started dropping notes and hanging notes like crazy. We were not able to isolate the source of the trouble. Our sequencer has no problems understanding the output of the Pocket Merge. The only difference we could spot in the data stream was that the Merge sometimes puts note-offs (that is, note-ons with velocity 0) under running status with other noteons. But the folks at Scorpion Systems tell us that their software has been tested with this type of running status, so conceivably the Pocket Merge was mangling the data somehow. Minor mysteries of the MIDI universe #793. Our advice: If you should run into problems, try plugging your master controller straight into sybil.
Controllers like modulation and pitch-bend are passed through unchanged, as are keys outside sYbil's sixteen-key mapping range. One small bug did present itself: If you keep toggling a transposition upward, sYbil will not error-trap the out-of-range note values. Instead, it will send out garbage (such as note-ons on the wrong channel with a note number of 0 and no velocity byte) that could cause your MID system to emit inharmonious sounds. But as long as you keep track of what you're doing musically, you should never encounter this problem.
As a lagniappe, you can export and import sYbil maps in text format. This permits sYbil users to share their creations, no matter what computer they're running on.
Conclusions. sYbil has a lean, supple feel, and in the hands of an experienced player it can produce astonishing results. A lot of thought has gone into deciding which features to put in (and which to leave out) in order to get maximum functionality with minimum fuss.
At $299, it's pricey. It seems more suited to some musical styles than others (such as funk or fusion-it's a snap to get runs of parallel chords, or relatively short repeating riffs), but maybe that just shows my lack of imagination, or my relative inexperience with sYbil.
sYbil isn't strictly for drummers, but it marries well to drumming techniques. Playing sYbil from a keyboard, I felt I wasn't quite getting the most from it, or it from me. For one thing, sYbil ignores the niceties of legato playing. For another, it's tough to override my fingers' higher-key-equals-higher-pitch training.
Like any good specialist's tool, sYbil clearly shows the inclinations of its makers. By intent, it doesn't "play itself." It doesn't do "algorithms." It expects you to have chops and discipline, and to spend time learning it, as you would any instrument. That's not much of a job; when you've got a good sybil map set up, it's a kick to play it-but getting to the playing point can be as much work as writing a tune. So who ever said music was easy?
I like sYbil. It's nice to see a finely made program that doesn't try to be everything to everyone. Unlike the woman with the personality problems, sYbil has a very strong sense of identity.	
