Hey guys. I’m collaborating with someone on an orchestral piece and I’ve blocked out quite a long set of patterns with all of the interesting voicing options… I just realized the easiest way we could fast track a quick sketch I’m sending them would be to export a chord chart… (They don’t use Scaler so I can’t send them a preset, etc…)
I’d imagine them being able to quickly look at a chord chart might give them ideas on how to re-voice things quickly, possibly give them some quick ideas they might not have arrived at not quite as quickly…
Basically it would be really useful if there were a way to export a ‘chord chart’ as a text file… It would also be useful for building a cheat sheet of modal progressions…
If you just want a sort of ‘fake book’, the simplest way is to export a progression as MIDI into a DAW and then use the facilities in that to print the chords.
Sure. But I don’t see why it wouldn’t be a useful feature to have in Scaler.
Also, not every DAW has a native notation feature built in, and/or the capability to print chords.
Basically this could benefit users who work in DAWs that don’t have that capability by default, but do own Scaler.
Firstly apologies - I hadn’t noticed this was posted under ‘Feature Requests’ -
d’oh!
I agree with you wholly, it would be a very welcome feature. I was just suggesting an alternative, given it currently doesn’t do this.
Obviously this would be trivial for Scaler, since it already knows what the chords are, so I agree it’s an inefficient process to export the in MIDI format and then looking for an app to do chord detection for chords Scaler was already aware of.
I’ve actually done some work using JavaScript on the ‘export state’ file to extract and print certain data (and store it in a database). It’s a bit tricky, since the file is rather unstructured, and data are encoded as UUID’s (the long numbers you see in the state file), and progressions are in MIDI note numbers.
No worries! And thanks for the suggestion in terms of people who might be looking for a solution… It’s definitely the way to go for the moment so totally fair point… Fingers crossed they might see this as a useful feature at some point down the line…
Sure, but not everyone I work with owns Scaler. Some probably won’t… The co-writer I mentioned is an orchestrator, I just don’t see Scaler being of any of real interest to them to be completely honest.
Chord charts are also useful for a lot of reasons… Including a quick reference chart for an orchestrator who prefers to work on an acoustic piano for example
I agree that your request may become an option in future updates. It would also be great if Scaler could export those progressions as an xml file that could be opened in any application to edit the score. These are things that currently do not exist.
So what you can do right now to share with other colleagues who don’t have Scaler isn’t ideal, but it’s simple:
Select the chord progression and copy
You can then open it as a text file, and from there (by copying back into the text editor) paste it into any DAW. In some DAWs (few, for example Reaper, can do it directly)
I leave some screenshots here
but until we get there, an easy way to share chords with someone in writing would definitely be useful.
