Family Composer

Musical Plan, the developers of Ikinari Musician also for the Famicom, developed this music creation software for the Famicom Disk System to allow users to create their own musical compositions and save them to disk, allowing them to revisit their own tracks or pass them among friends.

The game contains several dozen rhythm tracks over which the user can input an electronic approximation of keyboards, piano or organ music, much like a regular synthesizer. The user can also use a pencil tool to write a score which plays the notes as they’re added, useful if the user is working from sheet music.

There also exists a “graphic player” mode which allows users to listen to (and also edit the tempo of) tracks they’ve created in the music composition mode while an animated scene involving birds and ships plays out above.