Offer "Force to Scale" Option for Detected MIDI

Bernd · August 7, 2021, 6:09am

I love the “Force to Scale” option applicable to the built-in chord progressions (Songs/Artist). And I wish I could apply that to MIDI passed through Scaler, or Detected/Recorded by Scaler from incoming MIDI. Perhaps even for chord progressions crafted in Section C.

davide · August 9, 2021, 1:37am

You can! Just turn on scale lock and feed scaler whatever midi you want and it will force all notes into your selected scale.

Bernd · August 9, 2021, 2:00am

I suspect I am being dense, or we’re talking about different things.

So what I mean that I feed any external MIDI, very likely from an existing piece of music (say Bach?) into Scaler. By “feeding” I mean play the MIDI in a DAW track (via transport) and have Scaler listen to it via MIDI routing (obviously cut & paste chord progressions would be too much for a whole song). Then have Scaler force notes that don’t exist in its currently configured scale into a scale note. The Keys-Lock feature just filters out those notes. And the “Force into Scale” setting does not seem to apply to incoming MIDI, only to the chords from the Songs library. The lock button is not even there in Detect mode. Is there another way to configure scale mapping to incoming MIDI?

davide · August 9, 2021, 2:16am

Maybe I am being dense who knows? But ‘Mapped’ mode doesn’t filter out notes it forces them into your selected scale which seems to be exactly what you want. Feed it whatever midi and watch scaler do its magic. Prolly best demonstrated by Joshua Casper in this video:

Bernd · August 9, 2021, 2:19am

You are right @davide , not sure what I was smoking when I tried this and considered it not doing what I wanted.
It does indeed map notes as desired into the active scale when chosing this setting…

(and I didn’t even have to rewatch Josh’s video, lol)

EDIT: I think I figured out why this didn’t jump out to me earlier… I kept switching Scaler back to Detect mode when feeding MIDI into it, at which point it will of course infer a fresh Scale setting from the incoming notes and discard the previously set scale (and abandon the Lock setting also). So it was a workflow confusion on my end. Thanks for putting up with a supposedly Scaler “Power User”