Technical Information
The music was written on a variety of PC's with an ancient (and wonderful!) music scoring program: Music @ Passport. This terrific piece of software allowed Win95 machines to write pieces with 16 separate voices, something I haven't ever even approached! It was even possible to hook a keyboard up to a MIDI-equipped sound card and score right off the keyboard! The program doesn't quite work on my XP machine, and so I'm currently (7/2003) running back and forth between that and the Win98 machine at work. Meanwhile, the software is being upgraded at GVox. When their latest version can once again read my .m@p files, I'll consider upgrading!
The MIDI files are generated by my software. They use General MIDI instrumentation, which works on most computers and synthesizers, but might not do so on yours! In particular, I've noticed that percussion instruments (MIDI channel 10) are not all the same. If you're getting some strange percussion sounds -- like train whistles or dinner bells where those don't seem right -- and you would like to cut through that garbage and hear the melody, e-mail me and I'll see what I can work out for you.
My own best piece of equipment is a portable synth, a Kawai DRP-10. I can hook up the speakers, drop in the floppy disc, and play all the music here and more for church and elsewhere. It too would let me edit from a keyboard...if I had a keyboard.
Like everything else, the sheet music is generated from the software. The latest addition, though, is PDF995, a program that makes .PDF files. Seriously! This actually can make Adobe Reader files out of virtually anything you can print! You can find this piece of software at www.pdf995.com.
What? You surf the Web and don't yet have the Adobe Reader? That software is free and worth it. Go to Adobe and download the latest version.