Tandy 1000HX

I wrote 118 songs for the Tandy 1000HX software Personal Deskmate 2. The majority of the music is original. (Some of the songs have pieces of music from other bands or composers, like Mozart or Slayer, for example.) This was circa 1988 to 1994. The early songs sound kind of crappy. Then one day, I decided to go crazy and just make up a new style. The songs I made from that day forward were much better. So I think of those two styles as "the old style" and "the new style".

Personal Deskmate 2 is comprised of a bunch of modules. The one I spent most of my time with is the music module. The music module is a very simplistic composer program. I was quite creative with the few capabilities of the program. The program only allows for 3 simultaneous sounds. Each sound can be a different instrument, but the instruments sound mostly the same. The instruments are WoodFlute, Banjo, Cello, Fantatone, and JazzPiano. Banjo, Fantatone, and JazzPiano all sound percussive. Cello isn't percussive, but its sound rises in volume at the end of every note. I used WoodFlute as a pseudo-electric guitar, since it has no percussive quality and has a steady volume. A deep pitch WoodFlute with power chords sounds vaguely like an electric guitar. I simulated drums by using a deep pitch Banjo.

There are 35 original songs in the new style. Most songs are "metal-ish" with a variety of other styles. Each song is comprised of a bunch of separate riffs all joined together. The songs don't sound like ordinary songs at all because of the constant tempo changes and the constant and rapid riff changes. Basically, each song is a conglomeration of unrelated riffs all jammed together.

1. "This". (3:13) (4.6MB)
   This is a song from the new style named "This". (The filename is THIS.SNG so I just name the songs by their first part of the filename.) This song sounds typical of all of the new style songs.
   
2. "Fast". (1:54) (2.7MB)
3. "Skank". (2:31) (3.6MB)
4. "Hardcore". (2:36) (3.8MB)

Songs that I didn't compose are below.

1. "The Summer" by Antonio Vivaldi. It's an imperfect recording of the little songs I typed into Deskmate. Because of Deskmate's limitations, I had to type this as 4 separate songs. When I recorded them, the recording wasn't quite perfect. (9:46) (14MB)
2. "Tea". Also known as "Chinese Dance" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. (0:57) (1.4MB)

I recorded this with Audio Record Wizard while playing the song from DosBox. The timbre and sound quality of the music while played through DosBox is identical to the original Tandy 1000HX computer.

(See the electric guitar page and the latest music pages for other representations of these Tandy songs.)

This is the Tandy 1000HX Personal Deskmate 2 file format. I wrote this document. I wrote a Java program to decode the Tandy format and output to MIDI or text. I can make the source code available to anyone who needs it.
tandy_sng_format.txt

This is a screenshot of Personal Deskmate 2, running in DosBox 0.72. This is with THIS.SNG loaded. Notice that the GUI is only 4 colors, and it's beautiful. (The pathname to the file is truncated in Personal Deskmate 2, thus it looks wrong.)