For those who might be interested.

I have about 80 per cent of the code worked out for routines in excel that will play midi info as defined in john original post.

It would be something that you could play around with riffs and scales in excel. It allows you to define a note patter (scale or riff) a play pattern (a combination of volume and durations), select a midi player form your system, and a midi patch.

Not really sure it will have much in the way interest to most users. John presented it as something he was looking for and I had written much of the code years ago when I was first looking at midi and have begun to wrap that code into a package that actually does something useful, we, useful for at least on user's interest.

It is written in VB/VBA and so may be of some interest to people playing around in that particular environment.

Have a good one.

PM