Thanks for sharing.
Sounds to me like there’s room for even more horses.
Especially when we think across genres. (As a warning/disclaimer: I was trained in ethnomusicology and folklore. Genres are really important in both fields.)
What you say about IC2’s EDM focus is probably accurate. Though there’s no genre mentioned in the plugin, W.A. Production is heavily invested in EDM through their branding and products. Videos and demos done with their tools gravitate towards EDM (including Casper’s “Lo-Fi” stuff: not saying it’s pure EDM, just that the approach is EDMish).
Not that genres are so easy to define, more that there’s a set of expectations among people who use these products.
By comparison, Scaler 2 does contain multiple mentions of genres. The “songs” used to categorize chord progressions are themselves categorized by genres. Bass patterns also use genre names. Other performance patterns use stylistic labels, many of which are associated with Western Art Music (“Classical”). So, the notion might be that you can use Scaler 2 to create just about any kind of music.
It’s pretty much the same idea in Captain Plugins while MiK’s Pilot Plugins are heavily branded in EDM. AFAICT, the Orb Producer Suite doesn’t really use genre names while Orb Composer refers to orchestral music, including movie scoring.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not completely sure that musicians coming from that wide a range of genres are finding what they want in such tools. In part because the market isn’t there. For instance, most composers prefer to use their own techniques instead of apps. And there aren’t many Jazz musicians who get that deeply into “Computer-Assisted Music”. As an addressable market for this kind of music tech, “genre musicians” are probably too fragmented.
What does happen, though, is that people will use such tools to widen their “genre palette”. That includes EDM producers who want to make a track jazzier or Hip Hop artists who want to integrate some West African influences in their work. Not to mention movie scorers who need to create some “exotic” soundtracks.
And there’s something fascinating, there, in terms of how genres develop from one another. Or how people label certain artists. It’s common for musicians to say that genres don’t matter to them. It can have an impact on how they reach specific audiences, in part by how they’re booked, marketed, promoted, playlisted, compared, etc.
In the end, we’re creating all sorts of musics, of course. If we create it on a computer, it’s extremely likely to be in 12-Tone Equal Temperament using A440Hz as a reference. It’s very probable that it’ll be in 4/4. Patterns of 2, 4, or 8 bars are common. Tempo changes are uncommon. There’s a rather strong chance that there’ll be a functional definition of the sound sources (lead, bass, drums, chords, pads, vocals…). And unless we use something like Scaler 2, harmonic structures are likely to consist of just a few chord shapes, mostly diatonic, mostly coming from modes of the Major scale (with some allowance for key/tonality changes).
Part of what Scaler 2 could allow is a kind of ear-opening. Listening and creating outside of our “home genres”. Overcoming some of the constraints we put on our musicking.
And we can use multiple tools for this. For instance, by misusing Instacomposer 2.