It’s a bit clunky to audition each pattern one at a time. Is there a list in some sort of notated rhytm patter somewhere that I can quickly look through instead?
thanks
No Sorry there is not.
That’s too bad. It seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to take the patterns and notate them in piano roll or musical notation form. Information must be there somewhere. I think it would be useful for some of us were more visual. If Anybody gets around to doing it I think it will be helpful. Thank you.
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Yes, as a classical pianist, this would be very helpful,
As I can tell what something would sound like at a glance and not have to audition every option blindly.
After auditioning 100 permutations, I’ve forgotten what I was looking for initially!
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In development. Stay tuned.
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I’ve made this point in other posts, and in fact, counted the basic permutations of performances and songs/artists - more than 750,000 at the outset and then a few other multipliers more. By the time you get to the end your fingers will be too arthritic to play.
@Bernd sort of persuaded me I was coming a it from the wrong end, and really should (to paraphrase and exaggerate) use a pin and then make use of wherever it landed, which is my current tack.
However, I have kept on with my project of trying to analyse and categorize (just for intellectual exercise) and have been making progress, but it’s challenging. [Tech note: the plan is/was to uniquely encode all scales and chords either using binary encoding or “Godel numbering” (qv) . and then parsing that against encoded values from performances / songs, but so far I’ve only completed the first part of that.]
The @bernd approach would be helped by enabling a auditioned performance / song to be annotated simply and then saved and indexed in a way that could be queried. [I can sort of do this now by reading a saved state file and decoding the ‘UUIDs’ and midi-note streams and dumping data into a SQLite database.]
Again I’ve put that on hold as @davide and team will no doubt come up with something very soon on notes / annotation and user categorisation.
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I know @davide is familiar with Omnisphere, but for those who are not, it has some interesting search / categorisation features. The patch browser looks like
allowing searches by 13 different attributes, with a logical AND applied left to right. The * allows a score to be placed against your favourites. So soft/warm pads suitable for ambient styles with a simple structure would give
There is a really good feature called ‘sound match’ which, if you have found something you like, you can request similar sounds to check alternatives, thus
Now it’s clearly MUCH more difficult to do this with (a) MIDI (b) chords and progressions, so to do this would be a serious toughie, but maybe there may be some form of generic analogue to this which might help (and back to numbers - Omnisphere has 12,000 patches vs Scalers 700k + base patch equivalents).
As in a previous post, I have been contemplating what might be done in Scaler, but I’m pushing past the boundaries of my musical skills at this time - but it aids learning more, it’s fun, and with a wonderful tool to do it with !
Hey @yorkeman
as you noticed the amount of permutation and the ability Scaler has to reinterpret content make things hard.
We already have some good ideas but there are some challenges.
You might be looking for a sad chord progression (ie: Cmin, Gmin, Fmin) but you have selected a performance which plays only the root and fifth, when previewing the progression it won’t differ from a major one (ie: Cmaj, Gmaj, Fmaj).
If you are browsing for a progression, it is a nice thing to hear what it will sound like in context (with the performance active). However this changes the feel of the content you are browsing and can make some “tags” or category irrelevant.
There’s also the ability to play in chord/scale mode which can alter some notes removing for example all the jazzy notes from a “jazz” performance etc…
It is a really interesting topic and shows how hard it is to use our language to describe and categorize musical content.