I signed up to the forum after getting frustrated with the guitarist guide type Youtube videos on Scaler that do not exactly break the glass ceiling. I am unable to determine if it is the guitarist sailing in view of the shore or Scaler functionality plateaus.
I play a few carbon based instruments, with guitar and bass being my favorite. I also have a mandolin and a banjo for articulation reference. The music I enjoy has fills and variations in the melodies and the rhythms.
I have some old MIDI files I composed years back that I have revisited and listened to so many times that I cannot approach them from a new perspective.
While I understand that I might not be able to compose a 15 minute long meandering 70s Prog guitar solo in Scaler, I would like to know if it can rephrase bars of instrument melodies in various time signatures with a well-placed fill and turnaround here and there.
I would love to see a country, jazz, or metal musician make a guide for Scaler.
Thanks for reading!
This, if taken at face value, is something that Scaler is not designed to do. Scaler is a chord progression instrument. It is basically designed to utilize chords in perhaps more of an accompaniment session. Chord progressions can be for any genre of music. However Scaler is not, at this time, really designed to create melodies. You can use it to create a progression that can contain 7 patterns of 8 chords each for a total of 56 chords. You can have different time signatures for each chord if you wanted to but I’m sure that would be kind of complex and unwieldy in the end. That sort of thing is far better handled in the DAW. I use Scaler for music to picture and change timing on chords a lot but it’s mainly for mapping out. In the end I always refine it in the DAW.
You could use Scaler to Jam along with creating melodies on guitar/keyboard, sax, etc. It excels at that.
There are at least a couple guitar players here that could answer this better than me even though I play guitar. I just don’t use Scaler like you want to.
The Devs are keen on taking Scaler more into that area so new things will be coming.
Cheers and welcome to the forum and Scaler.
Hope to see you around.
Jamie
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Thank you for that fantastic answer. I will keep my eyes on Scaler. By any chance are you aware of a program that will do what I described?
You might look into Instacomposer or rapidcomposer. I use a combination of all three for the most flexibility that I have come across that this time. I also use Melody Sauce from time to time when looking for placing a melody line on a composition that I do as a reference for possible lyricists and vocal reference ideas.
Outstanding. I had RapidComposer in my dizzying list of MIDI tools to research. Your workflow suggestion is very valuable to me. Thank you. Here is an excerpt from the response email I got today from the RapidComposer folks. Someone named Attila replied. That is so metal. LOL
"If you want to modify an existing MIDI sequence, MIDI Mutator is the right tool.
With Melodya you can create new melodies from scratch.
I am implementing something that can create variations of a piano pattern, and works better than AI, and the good news that it is already built-in in the MIDI Mutator:
Some testing is required but after that I’ll send you the latest update before it is available to the public.
The Markov generator works with monophonic and polyphonic sequences, and preserves the time between notes."
