Indeed! And @davide is among the rare devs who actually listen to users.
Agreed about enharmonic spellings. It’s not that they’re unavailable (as Davide later pointed out a way to reach them). It’s about discoverability.
Like you, I was surprised that the plugin would list F♯ minor but not F♯ Major. There’s surely a logic to this which escapes me.
In fact, there are several approaches to nomenclature. AFAICT, there’s a strong tendency in some Jazz circles to only use the♭ versions of different keys (with ♯ for alterations, of course). I’d relate that to habits from our woodwinds which play either in B♭ (tenor/sop saxes, trumpet, clarinet, etc.) or E♭ (alto/baritone saxes…). Of course, if we play in concert A♯ / B♭ , we can technically call it either way. Still easier for me as a sax player to transpose that to C or G depending on which instrument I’m playing than thinking about B♯ or F𝄪.
The way I first learnt things (in middle-school), we played A♭ through C♯, in the cycle of fifths. (So, in my native language, la♭, mi♭, si♭, fa, do, sol, ré, la mi, si, fa♯, do♯.) In college, I’ve spent a whole lot of time playing D♯ minor and I never thought of it as E♭ minor.
(Of course, we won’t get into the differences between these tonalities when we get outside of 12TET. Pianocentrism is so strong that people are adamant about enharmonic spellings pointing to the exact same note.)
Really good to know! Never discovered this, I don’t think.
IOW: yes, please?
I was already using Scaler when I got quite interested in figuring out which chords were included in a given scale. It came from my experience with what I call my “noodling scale”, at least on a sax-like woodwind (G, G ♯/A♭, B, C, C♯, D, F). Which chords fit well with this scale? If it’s about chords we can form with these notes, there’s quite a range… which is difficult to explore through normal means. The chromaticism implies some possibilities which aren’t that obvious if you just stack thirds. Indeed, I find a similar phenomenon with wellknown scales, as you can build augmented and diminished chords outside of the stacked thirds. (Visually striking on the Exquis, which uses the Dualo keyboard: stacks of minor thirds and major thirds make diagonals of lighted pads.)
By happenstance, a friend’s son working at a café where I was working on this combinatorics problem then told me about Set Theory applied to such issues. My noodling scale is a Pitch Class Set and we can describe each chord type as a PCS. There’s an easy way to calculate which PCS is a superset or subset of another one. There are online calculators for these.
What’s more difficult is figuring out where I can find these chords in the scale.
For instance, I get that 7-19 (Forte number for my noodling scale) has three 3-11 trichords (which happens to cover both major and minor triads). Cool. Where are they located?
A whole other side of this is that scales can go really well with chords which have different notes from those included in the scale. The best-known example is the Blues scale, as played on dominant seventh chords. Don’t think Scaler is likely to suggest the C Blues scale on a C Blues (C7, F7, and G7 chords). There are too many modes which give a 4/4 match with C7, for instance. And if I play all three chords, it first suggests modes of “Jazz minor” (melodic minor ascending).
Could be really neat if Scaler helped me figure out how chords and scales fit together when they’re not diatonic.
wow!
Indeed!
