Scaler future directions

Scaler 2 General Discussion
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(sorry, long post; fee free to skip)

Looking through the many requests for ‘next steps’ with Scaler, I am reminded from my own past in software products that there was always the difficult choice of whether to develop ‘breadth’ or ‘depth’ in a product. [i.e. more functional areas or deeper capabilities in core functions - it’s often hard to do both]

My personal take on Scaler - which is such a elegant product in concept and execution - would be adding depth to the distinctive elements in that concept, rather than trying make it do what DAWs already do so well by broadening the non core functions. {Noting that It is already potentially the exiting ‘front office’ to the boring ‘back office’ of Logic, Cubase etc.) The key factor therefore in doing that would be to ensure the interaction / interfaces with those already mature products was as efficient and seamless as possible.

Another musing on Scaler futures is the comparison with synthesizer market success - what made the Korg M1, Yamaha DX7 commercial successes? {Sorry, I’m ignoring the analogue era here …). I believe it was “sounds”. Non-pro Buyers were less interested in their architecture or technology than that they had novel patches out of the box, by programmers such as Person and Hottop etc, which inspired them in the music shop.

Much of the (entirely justified) comments on Scaler are about the quality of the content i.e. “patterns”, and I guess developmentally folk want to see the range of breadth of those extended. I agree that would be great, but (just like the DX7) it was the underlying engine that made those sounds possible, and for me it is the evolution of Scaler’s musical architecture which is to me fascinating - and I’m sure Davide will have a long list of new ways he plans to do this !

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Apart from the other typos, my spelling corrector changed “Persing” to Person … sorry Eric P of Spectrasonics !

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Thanks an interesting post. Yes firstly the future direction is dictated not only by Ed and I but the rest of the team and our users directional push. Ultimately for me personally its about simplifying everything into scalers core raison d’être, which is about making music fun and liberating. Yet we also want to give access to a wider audience that we currently don’t cater too for reasons of altruism and revenue of course. Then there is catering to the more advanced composers and producers and integrating complex user customisability all whilst keeping the software feeling fresh and current. It’s a multi lane roadmap with no clear route from a-z. But we are very excited about the opportunity to rethink things from the ground up and achieve all of the above without losing focus of what scaler was, is and wants to be.

Yes I owned all of the synths you mention and those particular two were all about the sound banks, actually their synthesis engine was convoluted and not user friendly at all so their engines limited their longevity. There are many 100% perfect emulations of the Korg M1 and many DX type FM engines which make owning the hardware almost superfluous.

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You touched on a few points of interest, so I guess I would like to relate this conversation to my buying / thinking / reasoning.

I own a Casio Workstation. I own a Korg Triton-Le. I own a Roland FA-08. Did I need yet another keyboard or another sound module – perhaps not. But I did purchase a Yamaha Genos… why?

My wife already liked using the Casio as an Arranger years ago. I wanted to employ hardware to avoid the latency of VST & software. We both really like the “realistic” (to a point) sound of Genos. Is the price point of the Genos justified?

Well, perhaps… The Casio is part Arranger. The Korg has some Arp and fancy demos. The FA-08 is a piano weighted keyboard. But none of the keyboards are as famous for their Arps like the Yamaha make is.

The Yamaha Genos has aftertouch. The Genos is Yamaha’s full-fledged flagship Arranger. The Genos can accept two MIDI ports and play ALL 32 channels at the same time – the equivalent of two keyboards-in-one.

The Genos has some advanced sounds. The Genos “compliments” all the other different makes/sounds of the other manufacturers of keyboards that I already own. They all sound very, very good together, as I knew would be the case as they all sound very, very different.

So, I guess I’m into flagships of sorts, but sound is very important to me.

So why Scaler and where does Scaler fit in? Well, it never hurts to have more tools, or does it? A LOT of people say that, but it simply isn’t true! Using the wrong tools will hurt you badly without you even knowing it.

The wrong tools cause you to build the house funny. And the wrong tools cause you to build the house slowly. The wrong tools also cause you (during your slow building) to microscope everything and question your own self-worth from time-to-time.

Well, thankfully, Scaler is none of that! I appreciate that the purpose behind Scaler has led to a well defined road or pathway, and I really appreciate that Scaler is fulfilling the purpose(s) for which it was built.

I don’t see much fluff – it’s kind of slim and trim. Do I know music theory? Sure, you betcha! Is it something I concentrate on? NO! It’s just something that I do withouth even thinking. It took years to hone that. Well, Scaler is this and more to many, many non-techo would-be musicians.

For sure, I’m not downing anybody, or anything, whatsoever. I’m just stating that life happens and we go our different diverse ways for whatever reasons. Scaler is “probably” one of the greatest tools for ALL – as it truly levels the “playing” field. (Honestly, I wasn’t trying to be punny.)

Seriously, Scaler has never once wasted my time with “mundane junk”. The “hit-n-miss” random generator stuff that is out there really stinks. It’s kind of an insult, imo. But some really like it – that’s just me.

I’m glad that the Scaler team took the time to say hello to many different folk asking, “How would you like to develop some performances for Scaler that we can use in our product?”. (I don’t know that’s the question, but you catch my drift.)

To me, it’s simply amazing to watch a product that is constantly in full-swing hands-on development. Or, said differently, “Life is a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get”. Well, hopefully that’s close enough to be recognized.

Thank you for your contribution, especially during the past year that we’ve all been through. I have my own opinions, but suffice it to say that people have needed something to turn toward, and Scaler’s purpose and timing couldn’t be much better than it was, or currently still is.

What else can I say (that hasn’t already been said)? If you haven’t seen the interview between PluginBoutique and Ed & David of Scaler you should! (No offense, but that’s just the order you guys were sitting in left-to-right.)

It’s a really good interview; you should check it out!

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Interesting discussion to me as well

I was just thinking to do a post, on about a similar topic

Somebody could have noticed I did a couple of posts on AIR Ignite and Broomstick Bass
and I often mention other musical stuff I have as e.g. EzBass

Well, after much test and reasoning I understood that I love equally 2 different musical philosophies

  1. live tools
  2. composition tools

the first category includes AIR Ignite and Broomstick Bass, or my DAW with a keyboard, AAS Strum-GS 2 and Broomstick Bass
with these super-simple tools I have 100% fun and 0% hassle (0% study :smiley:)
but at the expense of little personalization, if any

Note: I don’t dislike to study, but consider that I studied a lot, and I still study a lot while working, so when I cultivate my hobbies I want to have mostly fun, if possible

the second category includes Scaler feeding keyboards, and/or AAS Strum-GS 2 + EzBass and EzDrummer that must be fed through a complex process after
with these complex tools I have much personalization but at the expense of much hassle (study :smiley:) so less fun

Now you’ve certainly got that the tool of my dreams is a “pink unicorn” :smiley:, so I’ll keep using both systems according to the mood:

when I want just to have fun, without recording anything maybe, only for the pleasure to hear a dozen of violins, I’ll use the 1st option
when I’m willing to study a bit I’ll use the 2nd option

the moral of the story is that the human being has a bent to unify (simplify) systems, but the uniqueness can hardly to satisfy all

my 2 cent of philosophy

P.S. I never had more than 6/10 in philosophy at secondary science school, and this explains many things :laughing:

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Very interesting topic. I guess I will go in counter direction of what was said in previous posts - I would hate to see Scaler become a “big fat rompler” with loads and loads of sounds or a half-DAW.

For me, it’s a composition tool that allows me to:

  • play chords that I would never be able to play,
  • play rhythms that I would never be able to play,
  • explore options “allowed” by music theory

I believe Scaler’s strength lies in its simplicity - the interface, while not perfect, makes sense and does not overwhelm user with zillions of options.

Why woudn’t I want more sounds (novelty or not)? Time… Looking for perfect sound in Scaler would distract me from my primary goal of composing. At the same time, I can understand that people might want more sounds - I guess Extension Packs would satisfy both worlds :wink:

I absolutely looooove Scaler as it is :heart: - best plugin purchase ever.
For me, to reach absolute perfection, it just needs split-keyboard and user programable expressions :wink: .

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The mention of Genos here piqued my interest - because I have a feature request already posted here to allow SCALER to act as a support app for not only Genos but all the recent Yamaha arrangersd that now haved the CHORD LOOPER feature in them.

The chord looper in Genos and PSR SX 900 and other keyboards is handy but very very limited. It records the chord change data played in - normally via the left hand - and stored in a yamaha specific SYSEX format.

This feature currenlty just lets you record 8 different progressions and then play one of them back. The idea being that looper playback does what the left hand would normally do -freeing you to solo etc.

But really we could do with a much better version of the CHORD LOOPER - eg being able to edit chords, quantise them, chain one or more of the 8 looops into an arrangement allowing the number of repeats for each loop to be set -

In actual fact were SCALER to add the ability to record this special Yamaha SYSEX chord track data it could be of use to any of the many yamaha keyboard arranges down several decades that have used this SYSEX chord track standard.

Yamaha are particularly stingy about adding new features to their keyboards firmware - so the scaler devs can fill in here.

I should add that the latest generation of Arrangers starting with Genos and PSR SX 900 etc - plus some clavinovas - really do sound very good for many of the instruments - guitars excluded - so modern one man keyboards are no longer cheesy.

Main reason for askig SCALER devs to consider this is not for performance usage though but to leverage the power of Genos etc as a composition tool.

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I consider SYSEX to be the spawn of the devil. I say this not as a complete ignoramus, but someone who has written Excel sheets to read SYSEX and print out patch details. In common with other old boxes (of which I’ve owned a few) my Roland JD-800 only speaks SYSEX. This is fine if you have an editor (I have the excellent MidiQuest Pro 12 ), but not if you want to interchange data with a PC.

I mention it because their web site has an enormous library of SYSEX stuff, and they also have utilities to manipulate it. Doing it all from scratch I fear might be hard for Scaler to justify commercially, but one possible route might to be use Bome’s Midi Translator (which does speak SYSEX as well as MIDI to do a mapping between Scaler and the device. But given the hours I trashed to make a simple patch printer, it’s a hard road.

PS I now have just three devices left in my MidiQuest Studio …

mq 2

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I believe that although SYSEX is part of the midi standard it is a part that is variable, and is included to allow individual manufacturers to define their own encoding and decoding of the sysex messages (see the LANDR blog explaining this). Therefore, it takes midi, which is a general standard, into the world of manufacturer specific messages: be they Yamaha, Roland, etc. and these may be different between manufacturers.

A great idea for those who have the Yamaha keyboards, but what about the rest of us?

IMHO I think there may be other developments either in breadth or depth of functionality that may be more appropriate.

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I can think of no other computer protocol like MIDI that is still version I since 1983 - 40 years; quite extraordinary. Further, rather than fading, it has become ever more ubiquitous.

The fundamental problem with the adoption of standards is that vendors wat to add their own twiddles, or they have no differentiation; they therefore introduce their own extensions, defeating the very object of a universal standard.

The genius of the MIDI spec (although maybe Dave Smith didn’t then see the far reaching effect) was the inclusion of a vendor field and a device / model field within it.

That meant you could connect up to N instruments in a ‘star’ or ‘serial’ wiring and send all messages along that, by using ‘MIDI Thru’. So if my JD saw F0H 41H 01 3DH come down the wire it knew whatever packet followed was for it, but the Oberheim on the same ‘net’ would ignore it.

Vendors then realised rather than rather than having some complex stream to change the parameters in the synth, they could just overwrite the synth’s memory - mega efficient, but also what makes it gobbledegook.

However, much of the pain of farting about in hexadecimal was taken away by vendors like SoundQuest producing a graphical environment to manage not just patch / bank editing, but managing the whole studio setup.

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