Playback of tracks w/ MMA - General MIDI?

[hardbop200]

Hello,

I've been considering using MMA to practice with at home.  Basically I need something that will generate "music minus one"-type tracks for practicing jazz, and it needs to be flexible enough to transpose quickly to other keys.  MMA seems to be the best tool for this job.

I've been reading the manual, and here's something I can't figure out:  Once the input file is processed, what do you play it back on?  Does it generate a .mid file?  If so, that would be great b/c I can pipe the output to my hardware synth.  Another issue:  Can you define what MIDI tracks instruments play on?  For example, can I say, "Bass on track 2, drums on 10?"

Sorry if these are newbie questions, I just want to get clear on these points before I dive in.

Thanks,

Josh

[kara]

Welcome to the MMA forum

By default MMA will assign a MIDI channel for each instrument. But if you want to assign a specific channel for a track you can do this with the command 'Channel', ex : Bass Channel 8 or Arpeggio-1 Channel 1.
If you want a standard assignement for all your songs you can add this to your MMARC file :
ChannelPref Bass=9 Piano=2 ....
Drumchannel is per default 10 in MMA
Have a look at the manual at page 108, it's all explained there.

As for the MIDI file player, I don't know on what system you are.
If it is windows, there are a couple of solutions.
1. The default Windows Media player, plays midi-files. If you didn't assign the midi extension to another programm, it will automatacily play the midi file when you double-click it.
2. Another solution is a standalone midi player, Van Basco karaoke player is one of the best known, and it offers the possibility to change playback speed and to transpose the song. This is pretty good to practise.

I hope this helps

[bvdp]

I think Kara got most of the questions ...

MMA was designed exactly for the reason you want: Practicing at home. Exactly what I do every day.

In addition, MMA has grown up quite a bit and can do a lot of other neat tricks Have a listen to some of the sample stuff on the mellowood site as well as here.

As to specifying tracks to use, I think you'll find that you don't really need this feature. It seems to work most of the time "out of the box" with the auto allocations. But, if you need to: yes you can.

And do shout if you have more questions.