Piano roll in Scaler?!

Scaler 2 General Discussion
1

Which new features in the Captain Plugins Epic would you like to see in Scaler?!

Me: I would personally like to see the piano roll as it’s a good visual learning tool to quickly understand what’s going in the background.

If you haven’t seen what the Captain Plugins Epic update is all about, take a look here!! Introducing: Captain Plugins Epic - The Most Advanced Music Creation Plugins Ever Made - YouTube

They’ve made a big improvement of their previous iteration, obviously a lot has been borrowed from our beloved scaler!! It is shocking!! :scream::flushed::confounded::face_with_hand_over_mouth: Shockingly still a cloud plugin. :roll_eyes: :frowning_face: :rage:

I know it’s probably been requested but a piano roll in Scaler would be a killer feature for music theory amateurs like me. Imagine being able to see what what scaler is doing and also have the ability to modify, alter and delete the generated midi notes in Scaler!!

A man can dream but I hope that day isn’t far away. :partying_face: :sunglasses:

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I’ve said it in the past. The general idea is

  1. Enter chords
  2. Choose a style
  3. Generate music

SCALER focuses more on chords and can be said to have been perfected.
The choice of style needs to be perfected. There are two ideas. The first is the real track of band in a box, but band in a box is more focused on the feeling of a band.

The second line of thought is that maschine’s extensions are very modern, but they can’t input chords to produce music yet.

It would be great if the scaler could be perfected, but of course it takes a lot of effort.
Maybe Scaler just wants to do good chords? I don’t understand that.
Welcome to discuss.

3

Seems like an quite interesting program. Personally, though, I like Scaler and then attach another program to do tricks based on chords. Yes, I miss Scaler even more different melodies and rhythms.

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I don’t understand it either, because the version of Scaler I have isn’t restricted to ‘just chords’. As I have pointed out before, there are over 750,000 useful individual melodic sequences that you can use to base your composition on. I have in fact just upgraded Captain to ‘EPIC’ as I sometimes use it, but as yet I have not found the range and variety of sequences that Scaler has. [Yes, you can press a ‘dice’ button and generate 200 pointless permutations of some notes until you give up. Personally, I find Scaler suits my efforts better].

"The general idea is

  1. Enter chords
  2. Choose a style
  3. Generate music"

No, that’s “A” general idea for some products like BIAB or Captain Chords, I’m pretty sure that’s NOT what @davide had in mind when he embarked on the project.

One way to look at this is your above 1,2,3 steps do not require the user to actually ‘compose’ anything. S/he hits the button a few times and chooses one of the ‘compositions’ the program algorithm has spat out.

The Scaler web site says what it’s about - “enable the composer within”, so the steps for Scaler are more like

1 Select a base progression- or part thereof - (choice of hundreds) and then modify this to taste

2 Decide on the nature of the melodic lines you want to go with this, experiment with building the composition you want using all the tools of inversions and modulations that Scaler has. The generation of music comes from YOU, not BIAB or Captain.

Your take on “perfect” is possibly misplaced. If what you want is a small ‘round town’ car, and you try out a large SUV, you might comment that it would be ‘perfect’ if they made it smaller, dropped the engine size, and reduced the height by 3 feet so it would go in your garage.

But that’s your ‘perfect’, not what the SUV people built it to be. Perfection is 100% subjective. I fear that waiting for SCaler to be a 1,2,3 button press to a completed piece might be frustrating.

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I appreciate that, and I think one reason for the variety of requests for Scaler additions is around how people use it with a DAW I guess there is a wide range of the time spent within Scaler and a DAW. For folk who get their progressions and sequences built quickly and drop them into the DAW, they will use editing features within that program., so there really isn’t a workflow problem.

If on the other hand much more time is spent honing things in Scaler, then editing capabilities would be more useful.

I’m sure there will be a compromise somewhere between the approaches…

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I am very much a hobbyist musician (which I would class as below an armature) and I am not sure I want a piano roll in Scaler. If I want to know what Scaler is doing I look at the piano keyboard at the top of the gui, If I am still not sure then I drag the midi into my DAW and study the piano roll of the midi clip.

A risk with adding a piano roll to the gui on Scaler is that it will become more cluttered and harder to follow, especially a there is already a piano keyboard at the top of the screen.

Having said this, I do appreciate that if you are not familiar with a keyboard, then a piano roll would be more useful for you than the piano keyboard. So if a piano roll is added to the gui would it make sense to make it collapsible, say at the bottom of the gui?

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I hate Pianoroll. Personally, I like the view of the keyboards. So I don’t support Scaler for that.

8

If it is a collapsible window then you wouldn’t see it or have to use it.

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9

thanks for the reply. In fact, I am now very satisfied with SCALER.
With a knowledge of music theory, use SCALER to experiment with various chords.
Speaking of improvement. I hope I can easily change my tune.
For example, if I choose C, I can click to change to G, etc.
The playback time would be easier if it could be graphical.

Maybe “piano roll in Scaler” means more visualization?

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Captain chord is uncomfortable entering chords. I do not like.

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Instead of using decimal numbers in Scaler’s Edit section, I would also like to put the lengths of the notes as notes. That is, time values. Full note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, etc. It would make it easier for me at least because I can think of time values ​​as notes better than, for example, 0.25 or 0.75, etc. Would Davide be a good place to develop here?

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I roughly understand what you mean. Just an arpeggiator.
You can choose speed, note length, including whether whole chords or arpeggios sound.
This NEXUS arpeggiator is very successful. The only regret now is that drag and drop MIDI is not supported.
But the arpeggiator in VPS AVENGER now supports drag and drop MIDI.

2022-04-07_202434
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13

Meh. Here’s the thing. All these tools have things they do well and things that they are not the best tool for, and they all have a few things that are very unique to each of them. So why not just get them all or maybe several of them rather than “all” of them. I have several theory and composition tools and I use almost all of the ones I have fairly regularly. I just look at them all as tools and I pick which tool I think will be the best for what I’m trying to do. I don’t really think it’s wise to try and make the one tool that can do everything for everybody. Often that ends up meaning it’s not very good at any of them or it ends up being very clunky to use or convoluted at best.

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15

you’re right. SCALER is already very good. After I open the DAW, the first VST is always SCALER.

Let’s see what surprises the Scaler will bring in future releases.

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You are correct @RBIngraham,

But I think that adiding a collapsible piano roll should not affect the interface very much, but might be useful for some users.

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17

After editing, it must be easy to drag and drop into the DAW

18

I am going to withdrar my support for this request: it is starting to sound as if it could require a significant amount of develeopment effort,

and hence be expensive. One of Scaler’s benefits is that it is very well developed and versatile, and its price point doesn’t breajk the bank: great for hobbyists such as myself

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19

I don’t necessarily disagree that that a piano roll view is helpful. In fact it’s what I think is probably the best feature of the Captain Plugs tools and the Orb stuff and InstaComposer as well. But I do think it would actually affect the user interface of Scaler significantly. In order for it to be of much use the entire Section C of Scaler would have to be turned into a Piano Roll tool of some type. It would change the user experience quite a bit and as you’ve mentioned above it would probably be A LOT of work. At least in my opinion anyway.

20

I think it’s an essential feature and won’t get expensive because of it. :joy:

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21

Thanks for your input good people. :hugs: :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
I guess the issue of the piano roll has some people who would like it and some who don’t.

Mine was just a wish but I guess the Scaler developers know best what their users need. Lets wait and see what new features Scaler brings to the table :wink:

1 Like