What is ConcertWare+?

ConcertWare+ allowed you to make music with up to four monophonic voices. The waveforms of each voice could be drawn with a mouse or by adding/removing harmonics, giving it a lot of flexibility for its time. It also had a sequencer based on standard musical notation. It had no support for MIDI, either for inpu/output or import/export. There was no way to attach a musical keyboard. The only way to create a piece of music was placing notes in the score editor with the mouse.

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When we reviewed ConcertWare in our premier issue, we found room for improvement. ConcertWare+ maintains the format of the original program but adds many new features. Great Wave Software is definitely listening to the feedback provided by users of the original version.

The most exciting new feature of the Writer module is that it can accept timed entry through the Macintosh keyboard. A piano-style keyboard is set up on the Mac keyboard, so that when the user plays the keyboard, musical notation with correct timing information is automatically generated on the screen in real time. Triplets are now also permitted.

A practice mode in the Writer module permits playing the entered score without using the Player module, and also allows playback to start at any point in the score. Different sounds may be loaded from disk and assigned to voices while in the Writer. Instrument insertions are programmable, so that voices may change instruments independently while playing back; up to eight voices can be maintained in memory concurrently.

Many exotic sounds can be created with the improved Instrument Maker module. Users have extended control over the vibrato, including the ability to assign vibrato to different parts of the envelope (the vibrato kicks in on the decay and release of the sound), along with variable rate and amplitude settings.

A FatBits-like mode allows easy vibrato waveform editing. Various default settings include sine, square and random waveforms. The Writer can also load preconfigured settings from existing instruments (including the waveform, envelope, vibrato and icons). With a little experimentation. composite instruments (a cross between a violin and an electric piano?) can be constructed quite easily.

ConcertWare+ is an improvement on an already good piece of software; now it’s excellent.

Biedney, David. (November 1985). ConcertWare+. MacUser. (pg. 38).

Download ConcertWare+ for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 1.0 up to Mac OS 6.0

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac