Kara-Moon Forum

If users want to share grooves, please reply to this topic

Thanks

Kara

So...to get it started...

Based on Bob's swing and bossanova styles I wrote two "light " styles. The accompaniment is very simple and minimalistic. don't expect too much, it's my first try to write mma styles ;-)

The zip contains the style files and the example songs .mma and as MIDI.
I hope a lot of new styles will be coming up!

Kara or Moon: would it be possible to allow midi files as upload format? Thanx

enjoy
Alain

Brenzi,

On the MMA section in the kara-moon site, you'll find a button "upload". Just click on it and choose "style" instead of "song" to upload styles. I think this should work, and if it doesn't, we'll make it work  ;)

Moon

This style implements GuitarBallad4, a bright acoustic guitar. It has main strums on the beats, and reverse strums in between.
Time signature is 4/4.

 For best results, use a warm sound font.

Thanks for uploading. Sounds great ... just need a nice sax to play along :)

Begin Doc

  This style implements RisingSun, the strum pattern made eternally
  famous 55 years ago by the Animals in their version of The House Of
  The Rising Sun.

  The style consists of three grooves with identical strumming but a
  different bass note.

  When you play this groove file you'll hear the first 16 bars of the
  song. The rest of the song is just repeating these 16 bars.
  
End

Thanks for this. Sounds real good when played via timidity. Oddly, playing on my synth generates the offbeats too loudly and they end up sounding like little drum-ish ticks. I'm sure this can be adjusted.

I sometimes hear this with fluidsynth and I always thought it was the CPU that couldn't keep up.
I just tried on my synth (PSR340) and it sounds normal.
Timitidy has no problems either, even with large fonts.

@sciurius any idea why I get this error on guitarballad4.mma ?

Guitarballad4.mma is just a definition of grooves, you'll need a song to hear it :).

Attached an example.

Oops, my bad. I had wrongly assumed that given the same file extension, grooves could be played standalone. Clearly indicating that I am cheating on the manual (and that I am lazy).

A set of 40 files with 269 percussion grooves, converted from Zoom R24 data.

https://www.squirrel.nl/pub/MMA/zoom.zip

Have fun!

Consider it included ... Thank you. Could you do a little (short!) readme to include in the directory noting how you did the conversions, your name (optional), and anything else you want to tell the world :)

I packaging a devel. this week.

The Zoom R24 recorder, like several other Zoom recorders, comes with a
collection of built-in percussion patterns. With a dedicated program
I've extracted these patterns from the R24 and turned them into MMA
grooves.

Each of the groove files contain one or more patterns that are usually
variants. For example, beat8 contains patterns 08beat01, 08beat02 and
so on.

Best is to play the patterns and select the grooves that fit your
song.

If you want to make your own rhythms, the Rhythm plugin may be helpful.
https://github.com/sciurius/mma-plugins/tree/master/rhythm

April 2020, Johan Vromans

Thanks. All included.

Often when setting up a new song I'm mostly interested in chords, progression and rhythm. For this I developed a couple of 'neutral' grooves: Neutral34, Neutral44 and Neutral68.

Characteristics are:

• chords are legato (organ) and span full measures
• a simple drum pattern (sidekick plus closed highhat) plays the rhythm

So you can hear the chords and progressions, feel the rhythm, without extra instruments and articulations and ornaments getting in the way.

The neutral grooves come for times 3/4 (ONE two three), 4/4 (ONE two three four) and 6/8 (ONE two three FOUR five six).

Good idea. I usually just take a groove that is "close" and edit the crap out of it :) Building up instead of down is probably a more intelligent way to go. Do you want me to include this file in the distro or is it just as well left here?

Yes, it is ok to include them in the distro.

In my quest for flexible and easy ways to deal with the specifics of fingerpicking guitar I think I may have reached a point that my findings may be of interest for other MMA guitar players (if any?).

One of the basic issues to tackle is that fingerpicking requires different patterns for different chords. For example, an E chord would have a bass on the 6th (E) string and then picks strings 4, 3 and 2. An A chord would have bass on the 5th (A) string and pick strings 4, 3 and 2, while a D chord would have bass on the 4th (D) string and pick strings 3, 2 and 1. Traditionally patterns are tied to grooves, so my first approach was to define a groove for each of the patterns and switch grooves.


and so on. This works, but makes it hard to use grooves of other kind of accompagniment.

Fortunately MMA is capable of switching patterns within grooves, which leads to a second approach: define macros that switch the picking patterns in the active groove. For example, a macro PPE sets the Plectrum pattern to a specific fingerpicking pattern (with bass E). PPA sets another pattern (with bass A). This makes things slightly easier:


Carrying this one step further by introducing macros that call subroutines:


then the song becomes a bit more compact:


(even though we loose line numbers... not a big deal)

But wait! MMA is a very good guitar player, much better than I am. Why? Because MMA has very long fingers  :) . So instead of defining different patterns I now define a single pattern and change the chord shapes to go with the pattern. MMA has no problems with this:


The song becomes:


The call to $PP1 is only necessary when changing to a new groove -- which is usually infrequent.

Attached two boiletplates for the sequence switching approach. Comments welcome.

Excellent!

Can we get this flushed out into one txt file and I'll include in the main distro.

I went one step further and created a plugin.
See https://github.com/sciurius/mma-plugins/tree/master/fpp .

Cool. Plugins can be so useful! One of these days we'll have to gather the "other places there is mma stuff" and put it on the main site. I'm going to concentrate on getting 20.12 out right now!

I have three repos:

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-grooves: A set of grooves for MMA (Musical Midi Accompaniment)

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-plugins: A set of plugins for MMA (Musical Midi Accompaniment)

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-mode: Emacs major mode for mma (Musical MIDI Accompaniment)

100%!!!

I've added these links to the "cool stuff" page: https://mellowood.ca/mma/coolstuff.html

This style implements JazzBallad4, a lazy jazz combo (guitar, bass, drums). It has straightforward strums on the beats.

Two variants: JazzBallad4A and JazzBallad4B.

Time signature is 4/4.

https://github.com/sciurius/mma-grooves/tree/master/jazzballad4

Thanks for this. Sounds great.