Musical MIDI Accompaniment

A Short Sample

For those who like to “try before you buy” (even if stuff is free), here is a real-life MMA file for the Cole Porter tune “I've Got You Under My Skin”. Depending on your browser settings, you may have to left-click the following links to download to a file.

Download (1K): ive-got-you-under-my-skin.mma

SHA1 checksum: 5b778eae924b2bea73f31f6894b424286dabf61c

And here is the MIDI file created by MMA.

Download (27K): ive-got-you-under-my-skin.mid

SHA1 checksum: c58eafed874cc9d91dcdff00d5a9e20ac0624cb2

Quality depends on your MIDI synthesizer. Here is a MP3 file generated via Timidity and some good soundfonts: ive-got-you-under-my-skin.mp3.

Here as some longer examples complete with more detailed explanations.

A nice little introduction: A Short Introduction

Grooves explained: Explaining Grooves

Use MMA as a practice tool: Practice with MMA

MMA Songs

This archive contains 1302 songs which I've converted to MMA. They are mostly jazz standards, but a few country and Latin songs can also be found.

Legal gooblygook: Please respect other people's copyrights—these files are supplied for educational purposes only and should most likely not be used for public performance.

The quality of some of these tracks ranges from “not-so-good” all the way to “pretty-darn-good”. I perform for various functions in our community and use MMA generated tracks played on a synth when going solo with just my saxophone(s) (not always solo, sometimes my dear wife sings as well). These are the same files that I use. Hire me for a reasonable fee to really hear them!

All the song files are packed into a single Unix/Linux tar.gz file.

Download (507K): mma-songs-21.09.tar.gz

SHA1 checksum: 51acf1893f93cea729e3b0b739c5dd21d62f49f8

The Kara-Moon Archive

Our friends at kara-moon have a large (well over 3000!) archive of songs in MMA format. These are mostly converted from "Band in a Box" sources. Most will need some work to use in performance, but they are fine for practice.

http://www.kara-moon.com/index.php?modid=mod02&l_submenu_id=m001_02_07

Plectrum Track Example

The Plectrum track (available in MMA 1.5c and above) emulates a picked or strummed instrument like a guitar. Here is a short example file showing a few of the features:

Download (2K): PlectrumExample.mma

SHA1 checksum: 13792fee4bb05f6e0c563ca188185b9597e25690

The MIDI file created by MMA.

Download (790 BYTES): PlectrumExample.mid

SHA1 checksum: 56ef68770c40cb898b0e45cfcde9957c934c1c56

And a MP3 file: PlectrumExample.mp3.

A neat addition to MMA is the ability to set a chord for a specific track. Our friend Alexis Archambault has used this to create some very interesting Techno tracks. When looking at the files note that Alexis has used Roman Numeral notation for the different chords making the styles usable in different key signatures.

You will need MMA 12.02a or later for these files to work.

To compile the files, use a command like: “mma -STEST hiphop”. The “-STEST” part of the command line enables the generation of the test code.

Both of the following files will be in future MMA distributions.

Download (4K): hiphop.mma

SHA1 checksum: a4c4b0bf672b4cbd605846114ae44af21e337be9

Download (2K): teamtechno.mma

SHA1 checksum: 7290ec650663060d41aa2e29341b2630a2d87426

And the precompiled MIDI files for folks who don't have MMA (yet):

Download (10K): hiphop.mid

SHA1 checksum: a9f2115c52f54b1d7d7278b5dadd123e0d75a72f

Download (4K): teamtechno.mid

SHA1 checksum: 04c8068422f7a18efd84001a3dd06b67d58337ab