FR: Notes Color (in depth look)

Scaler 2 Feature Requests
1

Hi,

I have see that mentioned few times here and there on forum but I wanted to go a bit more in depth about a particular feature : Notes color.

Currently, all notes have same color in Scaler (v1 or v2 beta) : blue.

It would be very nice to consider notes colors (for single notes, and chords root notes).

There is two major concepts;

  • One color for each notes, no matter the scale
  • One color for each interval, what matter is the degree here

The most common approach is to shift hue from notes to notes (C: red, D, orange, E, yellow) etc (what we can call the “continuous” approach), though another interesting approach is to shift based on Circle of Fifth (C: red, G: orange, D, yellow etc). The first solution would be perfect as a start, as is the most current and we can only find it a lot of chords/scaler app, so even having just the last one would be a great advantage.

My reference would be Chords! phone app, which does it very nicely.

note%20color
note%20color566Ă—1006 296 KB

(note: what matters here is not the fret display, just the color. This is the Interval model, with continuous hue shift).

This would be really really appreciated. IMHO, color notes is an indispensable tool for any “music composition made easy” software.

Thanks for your consideration.

2

Thanks for the suggestions. Interesting, we are toying with a keyboard redesign as we speak.

3

@davide Oh very nice for your consideration !
As you seems open to the idea, I made you a simple mockup so you can see what it could looks like:

scaler-color
scaler-color987Ă—693 32.3 KB

See how efficient it can be ? :slight_smile:

This is my color palette (if you need to make quick test, of course it will be better to make your own from your own Blue color HSL value):

"#0099DD" -- C
"#3462AE" -- C#
"#823F98" -- D
"#AC218E" -- D#
"#EF0038" -- E
"#F04E22" -- F
"#F5811F" -- F#
"#FDB813" -- G
"#F1DE02" -- G#
"#A6CF38" -- A
"#38B549" -- A#
"#00A995" -- B

(it come from my ReaTab REAPER scripts)

Being able to rotate this color palette would be a nice customization possibility to ease interoperability with other resources (some apps or manual may start at C with a different color etc).

And of course, a fallback to regular one single color palette could be optional for people who don’t like rainbow keyboards.

Thanks again !

1 Like
4

Hi @X-Raym

thanks for the additional info and the mockup.

We discussed in another thread that we might handle multiple keyboard modes in the future as people have different needs. Here, you want to work out degrees of notes on the keyboard rapidly, whereas other users mentioned how they would like all the keys to light-up in one unique color for example to see quickly which one is active/inactive…

It is getting difficult to satisfy everybody and personal preference and usage makes all the difference here.

So far we’ve identified a few needs:

  • Ability to see in/out of scale notes (current keyboard)
  • Ability to identify scale degrees (what you described here)
  • Ability to see active/inactive notes quickly (performance mode ?)

On top of this we still have to show the bound notes, arp notes, scale lock info etc… which complicates the whole thing. But we will find something that works for most I am sure with all the suggestions we get here.

Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile:
Ed

3 Likes
5

@Ed1 Active and Inactive could be just brightness variations, or stripes :stuck_out_tongue:

But you are totally right, lots of different needs, so yes, having the choice would be the best :stuck_out_tongue: The less is more so for sure having all these infos displayed at the same time may be overkill if these overlaps.

Good luck! :smiley:

1 Like