Music Master: Antony Crowther

Music Master

Creator	Antony Crowther
Released	1986-03-07
Platform	Commodore 64

For the example songs, see Music Master: Antony Crowther (C64).

Antony Crowther developed a Commodore 64 game music driver and compiler from 1985 to 1989. In Your Commodore 3/86, he released a version as Music Master along with 4 examples, an on-screen piano keyboard, and 4 pages of instructions.

A song is arranged in Commodore BASIC. You enter 3 tracks (one per voice) with notes, rests, durations, and commands to freely modify all registers of the SID chip and toggle special effects:

Vibrato (13 cents)
Pulse width modulation (3.125%)
Waveform change (after 20 ms)
Pitch bend (up at 1.7 cents, not down as documented)

Whenever you finish typing, you start the compiler, which tunes songs at 434 Hz. Unfortunately, its reactions are cryptic and undocumented: While working, it changes the border color and spreads characters over the top 4 lines of the screen. When an error occurs, the background color changes and you have to search for typos, syntax errors, and even superfluous spaces. Some numbers must be 3 digits long, otherwise the song may sound wrong.

Music Master was only used in a few obscure British games and demos. It was probably overshadowed by the already-released Electrosound 64. For two later versions of Crowther's driver, the demo scene wrote an editor which is not known to have been used on games. Somehow, Steve Rowlands and McDonaldland (C64) got to use the last driver version.