Hi there, I mainly use Scaler to create chord progressions and practice them on my iPad on the piano.
It would be really awesome to have the possibility to generate a PDF or Image of a created chord set with maybe a function to simplify/streamline the layout so you basically see only the keyboard and the Chord Names (or other infos) on top. All laid out in nice sequences.
Is this anything implementable or on the radar?
Many thanks
Hi @rudy3d and welcome to the forum. I kind of get what you are saying but may be misinterpreting. Does scaler itself being on the iPad with a iOS real estate friendly view possible help.
If so, not too long now.
I think the idea would be to have a quick way to generate a simple “chord chart” in the form of keyboard layout. The layout would be device agnostic (maybe possibility of selecting rows and columns). This could have multiple benefits:
Contribute to Scaler success and virality (lots of piano chord sheets being shared around “made in Scaler”, there is really no decent app doing that at the moment.)
There’s a whole chunk of new users who only want to quickly create chord sheets for piano. There’s not a solution out there. This new function in Scaler could acquire all that userbase.
A more in depth function could be to pair the PDF or image file with a MID file.
For example I brutally had to do this by copying and pasting.
You can of course export MIDI from Scaler and then import into some app which will either print a chord sheet or music staff view. (for example Band-in-a-Box for chord sheets or Cakewalk (now free to download) for staff view from MIDI.) However, it would be nice to be able to do this from Scaler itself.
“A more in depth function could be to pair the PDF or image file with a MIDI file.”
This has been a little side project of mine from first using Scaler. I’d envisage a means to be able to add identification and annotation information to the State save at the time of invocation. Although this would be ignored by Scaler when it’s read back in (I’ve tested this), the State file is a wonderful feature, as it contains more or less everything you need to know about a piece.
In fantasy land, one might envisage
1 a mechanism to be able to track the history of linked State saves to provide a complete audit trail of a piece
2 decode the content to print the sort of information you mention
3 have a means to search through saved State files to look for specific characteristics from previous pieces.
Although you might do some of these things in the DAW, my take is that you need to be able to go back to the source, rather than having produced something, then be in the hands of DAW editing to evolve it.
I suspect that most of this is very much on the Scaler folks “nutters wish list” . I can now however, decode most of the State file and store data in a more accessible form in an SQLite database (mostly in local Javascript), and have recently completed creating a useful database (from public sources ) of scale intervals and chord structure. I’ve no idea how it will end up but it confirms for me what could be done and the value of this really smart feature in the product.
Well the thing of the generated “chord charts” is that it can also create a whole new ecosystem of teachers or musicians who can sell their chord progression packs, etc.
But even on a basic level of being able to export something like what I uploaded would be invaluable!
I would keep all of it in Scaler as the UI, the keyboard chart, the notes, etc are really clear and cool.
Why going through the hassle of bringing it into another application and print stuff?
There’s no visual piano chord charts apps out there and Scaler has already that function embedded basically.
