I have a project that has 3 patterns. The first pattern is 8 bars long and has 7 chords. The second pattern is 4 bars long and has 4 chords. The third pattern is 4 bars long and has 5 chords. I am using keyswitches to play them all in progression 1-2-3. My issue is that when the 2nd pattern gets done playing, and the keyswitch switches the pattern to #3, the pattern starts playing on the 5th (the last chord) of the progression, rather than starting at the first chord. There aren’t any issues switching between the 1st and 2nd pattern, only the changeover between the 2nd and 3rd. Is the issue that the third pattern has more chord slots filled? I will try to add an unneeded rest to the end of the 2nd pattern to see if that makes a difference.
Thanks for your time,
Shawn
Hey Shawn
I don’t trigger patterns using the keys, but I believe I know what you are running into.
It is due to how you are using key switches to trigger patterns. As far as I understand, the switches (A) toggle the active patterns but the playback continues left to right and the pattern is picked up where ever the playback is in that moment. (There may be a way to start from the 1st chord but I’ve not stumbled on that yet)
Depending on how you are triggering the pattern, if you are hitting the E key to trigger pattern 3 on the last chord of pattern 2 (Fmaj), playback will drop down to pattern 3 at the 5th chord.
It appears to do what you want in pattern 1 to 2 because 2 is shorter than 1 and therefore it starts at the front. Make sense?
In the example (B) if you hit play wait 2 beats then hit the D key and 1 beat later hit the E key, playback would follow the red line and loop on pattern 3
If you want your patterns to play in sequence, just lasso all three pattern buttons (they will all turn blue and your key switches will disappear) and hit play. They will play sequentially with no intervention required on your part. You can also control click the patterns to select non-adjacent ones…
Let us know if that fixes your issue.
Yes, thank you, lassoing the buttons accomplished what I wanted. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question.
Happy to help. Good luck…a ton to explore in here.
I’ve come across this problem too when mapping patterns to a song. Lassoing all patterns is not ideal if you want to just rehearse the one pattern and try different chords etc. You have to play the entire sequence just to hear that one pattern in time with your song.
Do you guys know of this is a bug or just the way it works… seems illogical to jump patterns like it does rather than wait the next key switch?
Scaler has no Song Position Pointer so thats just the way it works for now. Probably will change in the future. If you just want to loop the one pattern just set up a loop in the DAW for the length of the pattern and choose only that pattern to play back. You can’t hear the whole song that way but if you are rehearsing just a section it works fine.
Ok, thanks Jamie… I thought I was going nuts for a while there! I get around it using small rests but that’s not ideal either… If they created blank steps that would solve the problem… So you just insert as many blank steps as you need until you want the next pattern to trigger…
Well, the blank steps are called rests. 
I use those all the time for just this purpose. I time them as I see fit since I usually am working with a movie clip and trying to time to different points. It works quite well. But ideally we would have Song Position Pointer so if you started on Bar 2 and go to bar 20 Scaler would follow, If you stopped and then started on Bar 6 Scaler would start there too. Don’t know if we’ll get there or not but it would be cool.
A rest you still have too allocate a percentage of the default time but if you had a step with no time allocation just to prevent the pattern jumping… argh… I dont know… or a song pointer … something would be good… I’m not sure if I’m unique in the way I use it but its cool to map an existing track to scaler then try different chords/performances against that track and without a pointer or blank steps its gets a bit clunky for complex songs…
Love the software apart from that though… opens so many doors…
I don’t see how you can have a blank with no time. Music is all about time. At least most music Scaler is used for so I’m unclear on what you are asking for. I’ll defer to someone else. Good luck.
We’ve made it work and have continued to add features whilst trying to keep everything ‘on the rails’ There are some stop gaps and some workarounds at times and yes it can be a bit clunky but we have established a clear picture of what scaler is and we are working to make everything more intuitive. Stay tuned.
Ok great. I don’t know enough about code but I’m sure you guys can nut it out. Appreciate your feedback - thanks both.