Newbie: building a track with patterns and chords

back in the 90’s I had a yamaha qy300 sequencer - great little device.
as well as the usual 16 midi tracks one of its better features was an extra 2 tracks - a pattern track and a chord track. the device came with preloaded patterns that you could arrange one after the other to form a song and the chord track enabled you to assign chords to the pattern as it played. this enabled one to knock up a basic track in very little time as each pattern contained drums, bass, keyboards and more.
can scaler2 do the same?
I don’t want to build my own patterns, I want to take ready made patterns and string them one after the other and be able to assign a new chord to he pattern every few bars. I’ve been trawling google and watching videos etc but can’t find a plugin that does this - unless i’m missing something in scaler2. I use cakewalk by bandlab. thanks for any advice…

I remember the QY … nice box.

I’m about to retire for the night, and will post tomorrow unless someone has answered al your questions. I’ll jot a few thoughts though as my nightly backup runs through.

1 You have all the essential elements. You might find Live a better choice to manage the overall process rather than Cakewalk (I know them both well).

2 Scaler provides the means to build chord progressions from a very large palette. You can also use and of the hundreds of pre-built chord patterns, known as songs.

3 The melodic overlay to these can be provided via ‘performances’ There are a large number of variations, and they include arppegios, bass lines and other constructions.

4 Both Cakewalk and Live can send MIDI to an external synth. I assume you will use the USB connection on the Summit (great synth!) rather than the DIN plugs.

5 Depending on the links in the chain, you might have to have timing adjustments to compensate for MDID delay. Live and Cakewalk can do that.

6 Scaler uses 8 bar patterns and you can have 8 patterns Whether that’s a restriction will maybe depend on the genre of music you are into (what is it ?)

Anyway, I see no reason why Scaler can’t achieve what you have summarised in your posts BUT a Mac to me is a Burger, so the Apple folk here will jump in and comment on your hardware chain, which I can’t really comment on.

I think that Playback Performances may help you with achieving this.

Using Playback Performances in teh EDIT page enables you to assign different phrases from Scaler’s performaces to each block. For example you may have Motif A1 on blocks 1,2 and3 but Motif A3 on block 4.

Midi Binding may also mitigate the limitations of having 56 blocks as you trigger each block from the midi input and can repeat it as many times as you wish.

With Midi binding y control when each block is triggered from either your keyboard, or using midi clips.

unless I’m wrong I get the impression scaler2 can’t do what I need. from watching videos I see scaler2 works with phrases but not patterns. by phrase I mean a single instrument playing a few notes over say 4 bars. but by pattern I mean several instruments all playing together over 4 bars. I haven’t seen any videos that demonstrate scaler2 changing the chord of patterns. thanks for any clarification…

Scaler can control many instruments at a time. If you set it to MMO - MIDI Multi Out you can have each instrument controlled on a different MIDI channel splitting up the notes. You can have several Scalers in sync controlling many instruments. All playing different variations of the chords if you want.
So I’m not sure exactly what it is you want to do if that’s not it.

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Do you mean as in

Captain Chords Captain Chords: Chord Progression Software + VST Plugin
Instacomposer InstaComposer | W. A. Production
Band in a box PG Music - Band-in-a-Box for Windows
etc etc

There are a lot of these algorithmic composers around which will generate multi instrument tracks, with a greater or lesser degree of competence.

Others are more sophisticated such as Rapid Composer https://www.musicdevelopments.com/ but it has a steep learning curve.

I’ve have them all, as have many other people on this board. Scaler can create the same end product as any of them, but it is more in your hands to determine the output. IMHO, however, none come with the same breadth of scope or compositional sophistication.

If you let us know the nearest product you have seen so far, we’ll tell you whether we think Scaler could do the same thing.

What might not be evident at first glance is that you can run multiple synchronised copies of Scaler as @jamieh mentioned. A single copy can drive multiple instruments.

The main thing it can’t do is percussion, but most folk use dedicated VST’s for that.

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