The Incredible Musical Keyboard for The Commodore 64

In this episode, I'm going to show you the incredible musical keyboard by sight and sound. As you can see, it is a keyboard overlay designed to fit on top of a Commodore 64. I should point out that Commodore also made their own version of this and the two versions are almost indistinguishable from each other. So the main difference is going to be which software you want to use, Commodore's or Sight and Sound. I'm going to show you both here shortly. I'll also take a moment to mention that this overlay will not fit on the new version of the Commodore 64, known as the 64c. Interestingly enough, it will fit on the VIC-20 and the Commodore 16. Of course, no software exists to my knowledge that can take advantage of it on those computers. Commodore's Music Machine came on a ROM cartridge. If you take a look inside you'll see it's just a simple 8 kilobyte ROM cartridge. One of the things I like about it is that there's no load time. And there's no disk drive required. As soon as I power on the C64, the software is ready to go. Now, one of the things I really like about this software is that does not present you with a list of instruments. So you can change the sounds by manipulating various aspects of the SID chip. Let me give you a run through of how it works. If you use the arrow keys you can change the octave up and down. This is important because there are only 24 keys on this thing. And by moving the octave down I can have access to these notes all of the way down here. And by moving the octave up, I can have access to all of the notes up here, giving me a full range of notes. The right shift key allows you to pick how many of the 3 SID voices that you want to use. Ok, so I will warn you now, this software is not polyphonic. In that, it will not allow you to purposefully play more than one note at a time. However, you can enable all 3 voices and what that does is it's not truly polyphonic but it will allow you to play a new note and the old note you just played can continue to decay on the other voice. And so, it adds depth to the sound. Let me give you a demonstration of that. The Commodore key here, will change the sustain mode. This is decay. This is hold. And this is sustain. The left shift key changes the effects. Here's vibrato. This is glide, although I'd usually call it portamento. And then here's special, which is a neat sound effect. The Z key lets you pick between four waveforms. This is sawtooth. This is square. This is pulse. This is triangle. You can use the C and X keys to change the pitch if you want to make this in tune with some other instrument. And the last things are the percussion controls. You can use F1 to turn rhythms on and off. F3 to select different patterns. And then F5 and F7 to change the tempo up and down. Ok, so that about wraps it up for Music Machine. Now, let me show you Sight and Sound's own software. It has to load from floppy disk, so I'll need to hook up a disk drive. Of course, that's the big downside to this software is waiting for it to load. Now, this is going to take a while so you probably want to go find something else to do. So, it eventually boots up to this menu. I'm going to pick F1 to play my keyboard. So you'll see the number of options is pretty limited. You get to pick from only three different instruments, synth, piano, and bass. You do get the octave selection, which is very important. You get only two effects, glide, and vibrato. Oh, and you can hold down the space bar for a pitch bend. Another neat feature is the SHIFT key acts like a sustain pedal. And you can even use the SHIFT-LOCK button to hold the sustain for you. But, let me show you the most important feature of this software. It's polyphonic. So, you can play up to three notes at a time. Of course, the SID chip only has 3 voices, so that's all you get. But it's a big feature. And I'm really amazed that Commodore's version of the software doesn't support that. Now you can also load the Kawasaki Rhythm Rocker demo. But, this is going to take a little time as well. Believe it or not, this demo was actually considered to be pretty cool back in 1984. There really wasn't much else like it. Now, I always thought the floating keys looked more like a spatula or maybe a flyswatter. Now that you've seen it, you can't un-see it. OK, so I wanted to take a moment to show you one other package that uses this overlay keyboard. It's the Commodore music expansion cartridge. Now, I don't own one of these and they're sort of like a unicorn in that they're nearly impossible to find. But, what it contains is a Yamaha FM synthesizer chip with 9 voices. Their software supports using the overlay keyboard or an optional external keyboard that looks like this and plugs into the back of the cartridge. And while I don't have one, it is supported by the VICE emulator. So I can at least show you what it would be like if I did actually have one. So, it gives you different instruments. The instruments sound so much cleaner than the internal SID chip. And of course it's 9 voice polyphonic. Now let me show you strings. And here are some synth sounds. And here's a demo tune. Keep in mind that the FM chip in this cartridge is almost identical to the Ad-Lib card in IBM compatibles in the 1980's. So as cool as I think it would be to be able to try this thing out in person, I have to tell you though, it wouldn't really be any significantly different than playing a keyboard like this, which uses the exact same yamaha technology and would sound almost identical. OK, so there's one more thing I want to mention. All of the software that I've just shown you was pretty much from the very early days of the Commodore 64. And the sound chip in the 64 was poorly understood at that point by most programmers. It wasn't until a few years later that a lot of the games started to have these really incredible sound tracks on them. So one question you might ask is, is there any more modern software that actually can use this overlay keyboard? And the answer is yes. One of them is my own creation. I've been working on a new program written entirely in 6502 assembler code. I call it SIDKEYS. ANd it is designed to use this overlay keyboard. My software actually allows you to adjust every aspect of the SID chip to create your own sound. And it's polyphonic supporting up to 6 voices if you have a second SID chip installed. I'll do another video on this software some other time. So if you like Commodore 64 music, I encourage you to stick around for the next two episodes. I'm going to be using the SID-2-SID card to add a second SID chip to my Commodore 64 here. And I'm also going to be doing an episode on the MSSIAH cartridge, which is a pretty impressive piece of technology that's a new product that you can still buy currently, today.