Erm… No disrespect to anyone involved…
Watching the promo video for Reason’s “Chord Sequencer” mostly reminded me of Tantacrul’s classic explanation of corporate music.
Now, I’m sure we can use the actual Rack Extension to create something inspiring. And, of course, nothing stops us from using Scaler to produce the exact same thing as in that video. It’s just that… If the point of these plugins is to produce this kind of unsurprising chord sequence with little expressiveness, we might as well use canned loops, no?
Again, I don’t want to say anything bad about anyone involved. And maybe you react differently to this kind of soundtrack. If so: at least, we know it’s easy to reproduce.
Hm… Didn’t catch anything about bass (lines) or rhythm being involved. If I get it right, it’s really meant to be the chordset module to link to other modules like arpeggiators and such.
That genre categorization actually sounds very close to what we have in Scaler when we choose chord progressions.
No bass lines as far as I can see. Rhythm would depend on the instruments you feed it to. I’ll check it out this week maybe and get back. Not sure why the OP is so down on the music example as it is no better or worse them any other software examples out there. I’ve heard stuff from Scaler that is just as lame. Look at some of the music in the new Cubase 11 videos. Funny stuff. Doesn’t stop me from knowing that you can use it to make your own music.
More toys for boyz.
I liked a lot of the functionality there. Their highlighted chord suggestions were nice with the darker ones more off scale. The layout track is quite nice. Worth investigating.
Just to pick up the discussion I want to say that I´m kind of flashed of this tool and I´m wondering if there is any way scaler could serve me with that kind of proposals.
However - Chord Sequencer is just possible to use with Reason? (Need a subscription?) Anyone knows?
If you follow the link @Enkerli left you can read the introductory offer
“The Arcade & Reason+ Bundle is available now for an introductory price of $149 USD for the first year. This is offer is valid through July 14th, 2022 and it regularly costs $249 USD/year. Both the Reason Rack Plugin and Arcade support all plugin formats (VST/AU/AAX) and can be used in any DAW, whether it be Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, FL Studio, or any other major DAW.”
Of course. Any subscription is like a rental, and in the end, when you cancel the subscription, you have nothing; that’s clear.
Go ahead that I do not advertise any product
However, I do have a subscription with EastWest. I love it and couldn’t buy all those sounds right now. Surely, I will end up buying the ones that interest me (the ones I usually use), but for now the subscription for €11/month is good for me, having all its instruments.
I had a subscription with Output Arcade and quit when the price went up. Currently, and until August I have it again because they offered me to come back for 2.50$/month for 3 months. As I say, in August the offer expires and I will leave it again.
With Reason+ I also had a subscription for $10/month for a few months. Then they asked me twice as much and I left it too. I have Reason 11 Intro, which allows me to have the Reason Rack in any DAW, and that works for me.
That said, I’ll add that the first year deal with Arcade and Reason 12+ seems cheap to me, though I’m not going to take it. Quite the opposite: Ever since I bought the NI A49 keyboard with Komplete 13 and Maschine Essentials I’ve had to make room on my hard drives to accommodate so many sounds and what I need is time to try them all out and decide which ones work for me. music and the way I work and uninstall the ones I don’t use.
I looked at this video with interest. However, (as a very personal opinion) the script was 90% anti-capitalist diatribe and 10% a critique of corporate video backing tracks.
The presenter obviously hated his time as a corporate wage slave, and as a London commuter. Understood; corporate employment is a form of prostitution - you get paid money to offer your body or brain, but hard to think that he gave of his best to the person who paid his wages if he spent his day mentally trashing their raison d’etre. However, it’s noticeable at some time he took the employers shilling when it suited him.
What was more surprising was picking on U2. He seemed to have a view that they were abandoning any musical integrity to pander to the three chord likes of the unsophisticated masses. His error, again IMHO, is that U2 are a business first and musicians second; their primary goal to to make money and to do this they have to create music with the lowest common denominator of interest to the greatest number of listeners. This is why they have sold 150m units (of no doubt ‘mind numbing’ music per Tantacrul) and won 22 Grammys. Their music can only objectively be described as successful, in that it met their goals.
Musicians who follow some eclectic personal taste on music which is not ‘mind-numbing’ are probably in the main very poor.
It seems to me that a fundamental characteristic of music is its incredible diversity. Ergo, there can be no objective assessment of any music as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; good’ is what some person likes and ‘bad’ is what they don’t like, and there are probably 7 billion opinions on this. One man’s ‘bland’ is another man’s passion.
My final (again, very personal) thought on the video is about criticism in general; this can be productive and good.
Of the few hundred people I have employed I had folk who articulated criticism, but they fell into two camps. The first were people who would say ‘this is wrong’. The second were people who said ‘This is wrong for the following reasons and I think we could improve by doing this’
You can guess who got the biggest raises, and who got the black thumbprint in their employment files.
PS I don’t want to fall into the trap of criticising without presenting an alternative. Tantacrul made no material suggestion as to what the framework for corporate video music should be, if any at all. It would have been a stronger video if he had set out what such a framework might be, and how that would be far more effective than the current music used by corporates in achieving their goals. I am am left wondering what that would be.
"how tech and oil companies with dubious business practices use music as part of propaganda campaigns to convince the public that they support ecological activism. "
Funny, I was quite pleased at corporate tech giant Astra Zenica developing a vaccine that stopped me from dying, and indeed at gave it away at cost.
These are Tantacruls words on his video. I think this wipes out any vague thoughts that his analysis on corporate music is an unbiased and objective assessment of musical worth.
Because you have to remember to look at the correct range of notes for the melody, to make sure it fits within the note range of the instrument in question.
I haven’t downloaded the trial version of this but I am not sure what functinoality if any it gives that is better than Scaler. In Scaler I can choose a style from the songs menu, whch will then give me a number of suggested chord progression.
I I select a set pof chords from the suggested pattern (say the first three) and then click on the SUGGEST buttonm Scaler suggetst options for the fourth chord. The suggestins that have a blue header are the closest fit i.e. in scale but may be extensions or inversions of of the scale chords, light grey header are close but not in scale and dark grey are chords that provide more dissonance (I think).
If I want more advanced suggestins I can switch to the MOD page and try Modal INterchange or Mediants or Neo-Riemannian modulations…
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Also as @jamieh metions there do not seem to be any bass lines in teh Re ason Chord Sequencer, so does it add any functionality over and above that of Scaler?
The software world is gradually moving to the provision of rental plans for software (aka Software as a service): Microsoft with Office 365, Reason, etc. Whilst I undertand the suppliers’ ratinale for this, it guarantees an income which they can use to fund develoment, I don’t like it for the hobbyist and home markets as it can force user down a road that they may not want to follow at relatively higher cost.
Also users may be forced to take upgrades when on a subscriptin plan.
So subscription products (withthe exception of anti virus) are not really for me.
Hmmmm. Yes but that’s never been a problem. I adjust to the playable range. Not every instrument has the range of a piano. If I use Scaler with guitar I adjust.
The nature of music.
Opus is made up of many instruments, most of which are ideal for use with the Scaler.
The exceptions would be those that have phrases on a key. In those it is complicated, but, again, most of the Opus instruments work excellently with Scaler.
Also, if you use Opus Orchestrator you will get a perfect divisi adjusted to the range of each of the instruments used; something that directly, with a simple drag you can take to a score editor or your DAW so that it automatically divides each part into tracks
