Randomized Chord Progression Playback?

In Bitwig and Ableton, which both have the concept of clips (on top of the classic composer timeline), you can program individual clips in a series of clips to jump around into other clips. This can be configured to happen randomly to some extent. So what I do is setup multiple MIDI clips, each with a sustained chord, just like I have the pads in Scaler. Then I press play in transport, and a random, yet scale-coherent, melody emerges, which I then can record.


Since the concept of sequences of pads containing various chords (progressions) exists in Scaler today, I wonder how much effort (and user interest) it would take to do this in Scaler, so it becomes DAW-independent and available for others whose DAW doesn’t have clip progressions. Not a high priority request for me, but might be one more thing that sets Scaler apart from other tools in this area.

1 Like

Hi @Bernd We are absolutely thinking this way, not in this iteration but what you are suggesting here indeed…Stay tuned.

2 Likes

Are you saying that the clips are triggering chords in Scaler randomly? 1 clip triggers 1 pad so 56 pads and a varied numbered of clips some with duplicate pad triggers seems like you already have what you might need. Unless I misunderstood what you are trying to do. Unless you are talking about each pad in Scaler changing the chord it has assigned to it randomly.

@jamieh What I mean is that a clip (chord pad) starts playing, and instead automatically progressing to the adjacent/next one in the sequence, it could jump to any other clip/pad. This is not something that Scaler does today - when you press play in section C or A, it goes sequentially from left to right. In some DAWs you can tell per each clip/pad what to do next (“next action”). You can tell it to go to the next, the last, the first, or any (even repeat itself by chance), or round-robin (random but make sure every clip gets at least one turn. So the play sequence can vary and is not bound to the static sequence that is possible today in Scaler. Makes sense?

Yes, that’s what I gathered. I’ve been doing some of that in Ableton with Clyphx Pro for awhile. A lot more possibilities then the Actions Live has.
Pure random is mostly frustrating. I do like chance and probabilities however.

Here’s an example for the kind of composition that can emerge out of this method. It may sound monotonous (only an excerpt), but it is playing itself automatically…
Clip Travel by Bernd@PDX | Free Listening on SoundCloud