I got an e-mail from a MMA user stating that MMA was very good for piano,drum & bass tracks but that he had
troubles with strummed accoustic guitar styles. And the question if I had any tips for him.
So I promissed him to post the answer here.
ok let's go, mind you I won't rewrite the excelent manual of MMA here, but build a style as an example
We start with the standard stuff and the definition of the rifs
Note : This is just my style of creating MMA files, you can allso define the rifs inline (see the MMA manual)...
SeqClear
SeqSize 4
Time 4
Timesig 4 4
Begin Bass Define
// - Nylon Guitar
NG1 1 4+8 1 98 ; 3 4+8 1 98
END1 1 4+8 1 107
End
Begin Chord Define
// - Nylon Guitar
NG10 1.5 4+8 0 107 ; 2.5 2 0 106 ; 3.5 4+8 0 104
NG20 1.5 4+8 0 107 ; 2.5 4 0 106 ; 3.5 4+8 0 102 ; 4 4 0 104
END10 1 4+8 107 0
End
What did I do here :
I actually devided our guitar in 2 instruments
- The tumb picking of the bass string (bass define) and the strumming of the other string (chord define)
- The NG are the normal riffs used trough the song, the END I will use for the last bar
Next we'll define the instruments and the groove
Begin Bass-Nylonguitar
Voice NylonGuitar
Octave 4
Sequence NG1
End
Begin Chord-NylonGuitar
Voice NylonGuitar
Articulate 105
Strum 8
Octave 4
Sequence NG10 NG20
End
DefGroove Acoustica1
We notice 2 specials in the chord-Nylonguitar
- The strum keyword, which will make our player strum the notes as he does on a real guitar.
You can experiment here with different speeds.
- The articulate keyword, which allows the notes to ring trough as on a real guitar (see the manual)
Now that we have a groove, we can create our song
Just standard stuff here
Keysig Bb
Tempo 70
Lyric CHORDS=On
Groove Acoustica1
MidiMark Intro
Bb
MidiMark Verse1
Bb
Gm
Cm
D7
G
G7
Cm
Cm / Bb
// Chorus
Eb
Dm
Cm
F7
Bb
Gm
Cm
F
As you can see I used a couple of special keywords here too
- Lyrics CHORDS=On : Will place the chord name as a lyric event, this make it easy to have the chord names in your sequencer.
- A couple of MidiMark command, again easy if your sequencer support standard MIDI markers.
When you play the generated MIDI you'll hear that in some spots the chords sound a bit high,
the D7 chord on bar 5 is an example of this.
Now, you know, MMA is a MIDI generating program and doesn't know anything about playing guitar, but there are a
couple of tricks to handle this.
First thing to try is the keyword 'Voicing Mode=Optimal', see the MMA manual.
We change the Chord-NylonGuitar as follows :
Begin Chord-NylonGuitar
Voice NylonGuitar
Voicing Mode=Optimal
Articulate 105
Strum 8
Octave 4
Sequence NG10 NG20
End
If you play the generated MIDI file now, you'll hear that it sounds way better.
If you still don't like the sound of some chords, you can allso use the inversion of the chord (see MMA manual)
EX : Try D7>1 or D7>-1
Or you could allso drop the chord an octave, this won't sound good here, but I mention it just for reference
Ex : -D7
Let's add a decent end to our song.
For accoustic styles like this, I like to end with a single note and one a octave higher played at the same time.
Easy to do, we allready defined the riffs, the only thing we have to do is to define the groove
This is what we add, under the first groove :
Begin Bass-Nylonguitar
Voice NylonGuitar
Octave 4
Sequence END1
End
Begin Chord-NylonGuitar
Voice NylonGuitar
Voicing Mode=Optimal
Articulate 105
Strum 0
Octave 4
Sequence END10
End
DefGroove EndAcoustica1
Nothing special here.
And we add the change of groove in our song just before the last bar :
You can download the MMA file and render it for yourself or in case you don't have MMA YET listen to the music which is allso
attached to this post.
If you have any questions, you can ask them here, if I don't have an answer, I'm sure Bob will
In the next episode we will make this style a bit more complete.
Until then
Happy MMA'ing k