I wish I understood, Italian but could someone translate for this non classically trained guitarist?
Thank you so much in advance.
Hi @Ze3b
Welcome to the forum.
Most of the Italian musical terms are commonly used across many styles of music, not just classical, and I would suggest it would be useful to learn some of the basic terms: andante, vivace, etc., as these are used as a shorthand to suggest tempo and/or a style of playing (Espressivo means expressively). I understand that this can be confusing if you are not familiar with a term, but the highest level terms
are in common usage in music.
For me the key point is that although these may guide one to a performance, the guides are not set in stone. Just because a performance is grouped under vivace (in a brisk spirited manner) doesn’t mean it won’t play well at a slower tempo (say 60 bpm which could be an adagio): you just have to try it.
At the more detailed level
I believe that although the developers have given Italian names to some of the performances (In the performances under the Vivace grouping Fortepiano means Loudsoft and is also the name of a type of early piano which evolved into the modern day piano; and Da Capo means “from the beginning” in music) I think these are simply names for performances, and I don’t think a translation would be very meaningful.
In other cases the names are not descriptive: Basic 1, Basic 2…Basic 10.
(NB this is not a criticism of the naming, simply an observation).
So IMHO the best way to interpret the performances is by auditioning them in your composition and which one(s) are appropriate for the composition.
And remember you are not limited to using one performance throughout a pattern. You can use different performances on different blocks through the Playback Performances panel on the EDIT page.
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Thanks Ed for your thoughtful reply. I understand. My thought was simply the devs could maybe have included a tool tip for each one for more guidance. But you are correct, it would be helpful to learn a few of them. I’ll have to Google them when I have time.
You need to not get caught up in the naming of the Expressions. Most companies under similar conditions would just name them Expression 1 Expression 2 etc. As Davide has noted way back at the start of Scaler these names are just more interesting then Pattern 1 etc. They really are not meant to be used as anything other then names you might find interesting to explore. Audition them and have fun. Fun is what it’s all about.
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I agree that 1) the current names are more evocative than pat1, pat2, etc; and 2) that Italian names have a long and useful history in music notation. But, really, that doesn’t help.
I am, right now, going through the performance list trying out each item to get a general feel for its pattern. But there are a lot of these … I came to this page to see if there’s a list somewhere that gives a brief description for each. There doesn’t seem to be one.
This isn’t a Scaler problem. I have plugins whose patterns are named “Rosy Day”, “Bazoomba”, and the like. Those are just as bad.
You might look at Phase Plant - they give a brief description of each option. Not perfect, subjective … but enough to let you skip many choices.
There is plenty of room in the Scaler menu boxes to include a one line description. “Adagio: slow tempo”, “Precipitando: rushed, hasty”. This would be a great improvement and would save some of us lots and lots of time.
The same problem does not exist for Songs, but it does for Artists. Songs are nicely catagorized. I might not know the difference between Fixed Bass and Future Bass, but a couple of clicks will play an example of each. On the other hand, I have heard of none of these Artists. OK, I’m ignorant, but I paid for the software and I’d like to be able to use the Artists section without having to test drive each instance.
Again, it’s not about Italian, and it’s not about boring word choice … it’s about descriptions - of which there are currently none.
As someone with no formal music background, there are a lot of terms used and the idea of tooltips would help me. I don’t accept the argument they are just labels as they clearly have a design concept and I have long since got bored testing them out to the detriment of dabbling in music creation.
Well, this information partly exists: from top to bottom of each list of patterns, the speed raises, so you have quickly an idea…
that said, most plugins I have use fancy names for patterns
only Scaler uses the Italian names, even if I don’t think that Davide or the other devs have ever played in a classical orchestra 
But they used the Italian names because they are universally recognized by any musician that studied the musical theory in any academy of music in most countries
That said, I don’t care a fig of those names, because I got since years that I can use in my music any kind of pattern or scale, whatever the name
YMMV