OFF TOPIC - Animation Station Arp Sale Currently $37.50

Scaler 2 General Discussion
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I ended up spending all afternoon with House Engine (thank you @barza !) and found it to be the perfect complement to, if not fraternal twin of, Scaler. While Scaler has more permutations of MIDI patterns, House Engine has a quicker workflow by showing 305 variations to a given chord progressions at once, visually as MIDI patterns, and letting them be audited very quickly.
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Nothing that future instances of Scaler couldn’t incorporate. For the time being, they are near-ideal complements to another.

No House Just Engine by Bernd@PDX | Free Listening on SoundCloud

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Yes, not house indeed… ambient I suppose
nothing of interest to me :crazy_face:
but I’ll try the demo anyway

P.S. last night I tried to compose a trance stuff with Ableton arpeggiators
and there are plenty of them in Ableton and for free :grinning:

but I fed up after a few seconds: I can’t cope with trance, techno, hip-hop, trip-trap, clic-clac and similar musical bugs
:crazy_face: :cold_face: :rofl:

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You still need Riffer 3 and I can give it for free to you, @Bernd
:grinning:

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I am afraid you then expect me to compose something like this…

On the other hand, at about 8min in it sounds mighty familiar to tribal house/techno :laughing:

And BTw, I also think this band and Hendrix used the same Scaler chord progression :upside_down_face:

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As a bare minimum…
:rofl: :rabbit2: :carrot: :drum:

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Tested House Engine and uninstalled quickly
The worst demo ever!
I can only drop one MIDI in Scaler of a few available, and as far I try another (the 1st was not impressive BTW), HAL9000 says I depleted the cartridges, YUK

Maybe the other MIDIs are fine, but who knows?

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Your supposed to drop a chord progression from Scaler into the Demo. Not the other way around.

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Is there anything that does the opposite of House Engine which allows one to feed a melody and then get a set of chords in a similar interface to this? Scaler is amazing when you want to go hunting but sometimes I’m lazy and would like an algorithm to put together a variety of chords sets to a melody.

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Yes, but you can spend just as much on other tools.

Which tools are the most expensive? The most expensive tools are the ones that you bought and never use. Sometimes it’s the tool and sometimes it’s because we never “got a round tuit”. :scream_cat:

If you purchase a “tool” and you use it a lot, even if you don’t make money using it, sometimes the joy of the end result just making you feel “happy, wonderful, great” is enough to “pay” for it.

Price is usually justified in perceived value. Bananas for a Rabbit Composer :rabbit: probably wouldn’t appeal to a rabbit as much as carrots might.

I find the house software is too choppy for my tastes, but Animation Station both of us liked right off.

We have hardware we use. We own/use a Casio WK-3700; Korg TritonLE; Roland JV-1010, FA-08, Integra-7; Terratec Axon; DigiTech GSP-1101; and Yamaha Genos.

The TC-Helicon Voicelive Rack is also a great and fun way to add instrumental harmony; it doesn’t all have to be vocals, it can/will add instrumental harmony just as easy.

I compose for band and orchestra in the same song (mixed) and like to keep these keyboards, modules, and processors busy! :wink:

Now all of this might seem pricey, but just think about all of the VST’s, VSTi’s, and Kontakt (and other) Sound Libraries that are purchased and then never used.

I might also add, because it’s a MIDI effect that can be used with hardware the latency is very, very low. It’s something my dinosaur :sauropod: Win7 computer can deal with.

Scaler is wonderful, but so is Animation Station now too. I can certainly use it to drive my hardware in my arrangements and compositions.

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I picked up Animation Station. I don’t think $99 is all that much to pay really. Is it as good of a deal as Scaler? No. But will I make use of it, I believe I will. And I have some other Sample Logic sample libraries. I think they are a good developer and I don’t mind paying to support a developer I think is doing good work. Would I pay the full price of $150 for it? Probably not. Or I probably wouldn’t have just jumped on it right away. The introductory price was really the primary motivator or I likely would have waited until I had a project where I felt I needed it.
This really feels like an expansion of the arpeggiator they have put into some of their sample libraries. I have only had a chance to tinker around for a few minutes here and there. I’m sure it will be useful for the right project. I do like the randomization. At the same time, if find something you like with the randomization, you better save it (just like those Spitfire Evo libraries that give you a random patch) because one wrong mouse click and you’ve randomized it again and what you had is gone. There is a lot of control for what will and will not change when you randomize but still, it can easily be tossed aside and it’s not easy to get it back unless you save a preset.

I do appreciate both approaches really. Tools like Captain Plug Ins are nice in that they have randomize functionality. But it’s also nice that in Scaler as long as you know what Chord set you choose, what key and any performance you may have used, you can reproduce past results without too much hassle if you tossed an idea aside too quickly and want to get it back.

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Well said. Animation Station has potential when working it with Scaler for sure.

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ooof, too expensive for what it does. I use Reason, and we have some stellar players that provide the same functionality for a fraction of the price!

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Yes, well then, perhaps Symphonic AI for $500 is not even a consideration?!

I bought Animation Station, but I do have to admit that seeing the MIDI graphic in House Engine is a big plus. Also, I really like the sound and filtering of Symphonic AI.

Reason is way out of my ballpark as it’s min req is Win10 and a faster computer.

I did purchase Animation Station, so I will give it a go. And if I can’t get things done in a reasonable manner I will purchase Symphonic AI, too.

I value my time at much more than $500 when I am focused and trying to make things happen. Over time, a tool that doesn’t do what you need it to do costs way more than $500.

And I will probably use both of them; no reason not to. I have had the “propeller-heads” rack since it was a giveaway at PluginBoutique and I have never used it.

P.S. I did purchase Symphonic AI a few hours or so after I purchased Animation Station. I feel pretty good about these. But Scaler 2 is a must have, and someday soon, hopefully, there will be a Scaler 3! Development costs money. :moneybag::money_mouth_face:

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I am sorry but I do not understand why members feel it necessary to use the “General Discussion” platform to market 3rd party software other than Scaler. I purchased Scaler and use it to my benefit and use this site to further my understanding of current and future capabilities of this great software. I, on the other hand, am not interested to know how “groovy” and “mind blowing” other 3rd party VST or software suites are. So, if you could be so kind, please refrain from expounding your accolades with respect to, in this instance, “Animation Station” or any other platform you feel it necessary to hype. It wastes my time in that it does not provide additional knowledge on the Scaler product and frankly I am not interested in your opinion of how great “Animation Station” is at it’s current price point of $149.99. Of course, this is my opinion so take this with a grain of salt. Respectfully,

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I wouldn’t call this discussion “marketing”. Many of us use Scaler in a larger ecosystem of plugins, and I think it is useful to learn what other tools can complement Scaler use. Another aspect examining other music tools is to see how much of their functionality could be implemented in Scaler. And talking about price points is always useful as it helps us recognize the value Scaler offers with its pricing level compared to others vis-a-vis features offered.

My general sense is that this is not entirely just a Scaler support forum, but also a social platform for broader exchange of musical aspects, with Scaler playing an important role, but not happening in isolation. But I’ll let others chime in what their understanding is. Perhaps the admins can add some guidance too.

And I can see how you might be distracted by this, if you are not interested in this sort of information. Perhaps we can come up with a more intuitive forum organization by section or tags to make it easier to find/sort/filter what you’re interested in. What do you propose?

For my part, if this generally good natured conversation will be limited in its diversity, I for my part have less incentive to be here, and with it comes/goes my volunteering to help other Scaler users. It’s a give & take, as always in social context. We are not robots - even though we’ve had some fun discussions around this concept :wink:

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I’m sorry you are offended. Scaler is a tool that is meant to utilize lots of other external tools. It was never meant as an end all be all self contained music machine. It creates chord progressions for use in compositions. I use many tools together with Scaler to achieve that end - DAW, Arps, composition tools like Rapidcomposer, synths, orchestral sample libraries. All of these and perhaps more all contribute to the beauty that is Scaler.
If the was a section called Off Topics-Coffee House talk I would have put it there but General Discussion is the closest there is. This is a general discussion about a tool I found interesting to use WITH Scaler. It’s a simple as that. I am not marketing anything. I like people to know about things that are fun to use and helps creatively. I don’t see it as really off topic of creating with Scaler.
Cheers, my friend. It’s all good. Next time I’ll label it Off Topic and that should do it.

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I respect where @jccube is coming from but for this forum to be useful to us as developers we need to keep it an open and free platform for users to discuss whatever they like. Also keeps us in our feet should we have missed something!

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Mostly what sold me on Symphonic AI is two things.

  1. The preset browser (based on tag filtering) is super slick and easily modified by the user. The fact that the presets come pre-tagged gives a great starting point.

  2. It comes with 13 GB library from RedRoom and doesn’t sound too shabby. The effects can easily be turned off and the MIDI In driven by Scaler. I believe that it’s something my dinosaur :sauropod: computer may be able to handle.

*The preset tagging and filtering system is simple, yet elegant, and something relatively easy to implement. I think something similar would be welcomed by all.

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It was a joke :grinning:
I read $149,999.99 instead of $149
:wink:

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Yes, I know. I can tell by looking at your avatar that your eyes need a rest! Much sleep is lost when you’re wearing headphones at night. :headphones::night_with_stars:

A little bit contradictory on comma and period placement? Anyway, I enjoy your posts!

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