As I am getting involved in more guitar music, I was looking at Scaler’s guitar features. And other than the strumming performance mode, I haven’t seen much of picking patterns. Is this something I overlooked, or is this something perhaps on the feature roadmap? I am thinking of something like the NI Guitar plugins, that come with certain music style picking patterns. Or are these patterns hidden under different names in the music style section in Scaler?
Would love to hear what your strategy is to support more complex patterns for guitar melodies.
To me, the best way is using an external guitar plugin (UJAM, AAS, whatever) driven by Scaler
I tried to build something possibly like what you are asking for, using combinations of:
low/fast times (0,5 or 2x)
exotic patterns (oddest time signatures)
Humanize swing oddest
Multiple Scaler with the above settings
but I found the process too much cumbersome, and the result too much close to a synth
some examples from Hookpad for “rock” and “acoustic” (although the “electric” uses the same) - arpeggios, Travis, Basic Fingerstyle (ala JT). another set of examples would be Kontakt Session guitarist libraries for simple picking patterns.
You’re correct that Scaler doesn’t include any dedicated picked guitar performances, outside of the strummed sequences and strumming articulation, but this is certainly something which could be expanded upon in future updates.
That being said, I do find many of the existing performances to be well suited to creating picked guitar performances. @ClaudioPorcellana has some great tips here regarding experimenting with performance settings like expression speed, humanize, voice grouping etc.
In my experience, Scaler’s internal sounds such as Alternative Guitar and Steel Acoustic work great with Phrases set to 0.5x resolution speed, using Dynamic Voice Grouping, with Phrase Style in Scaler’s settings set to ‘Melody’. This way the chord notes themselves aren’t played alongside the phrases.
But there are lots of other expression types and settings which work great too. And like @fossile, I’m also a fan of Native Instruments’ Session guitar libraries, which are phrase based libraries so you only need to send them your desired chords from Scaler and they take care of the rest!
I have used Hookpad for a while and found it very interesting. But last time I got involved with it (2 years ago) it was just a website, and did not integrate with a DAW or MIDI. Has that changed since?
it’s still a web site with microservices so you still need to export the MIDI or WAV (or documents). i use to generate the base MIDI for several instruments and then import into other tools (like Scaler, Toontrack, my DAW, etc) to further refine and expand.
