Go to plugin boutique copy your original licence. Go to WA and register it there. Once you do this you become eligible for upgrade at $10 from WA only.
You can download the demo at WA and add your new licence to authorize.
Just downloaded the update. Easily worth $10 if you use Instacomposer. I liked the addition of the scenes and the drum track. This is a FAST way to come up with multiple chord progressions, melody and rhythm tracks to review and repeat until you find something to work with.
1 Like
If someone bought the update to InstaComposer 2 and could not find Presets in the menu, the reason is that Chords and Presets subfolders are missing in Windows install folder in the downloaded zip file. However, they are in Mac folder in zip. Take these subfolders and copy them to C:\Users<your user>\AppData\Roaming\WAProduction\Instacomposer 2. Or simply cooy the presets from IC 1, that can found in C:\Users<your user>\AppData\Roaming\WAProduction\Instacomposer. They are the same.
2 Likes
More to generate than to compose. Although it seems you may compose you do not in fact. Even if you pick a certain part out of the generated ones and alter it again it is always a product of an algorhythm. This is not composing, this is pressing knobs to get INSTANT satisfaction. Similar to order things online there is a very very short time after sending an order when feeling happy but this is countable in seconds. Same here.
Just out of curiosity, which one of you thinks you can really make better music with all these tools? I don’t mean more music, but better quality than before using these machines?
You might be able to overcome times of creativity lost but to me (and I´m musician and writer since 45 years now) these times are normal and occur.
1 Like
Same, confused by its UI, even tho its possibilities in terms of generative music seems amazing. If I just could figure out how to use it. But such is the life of aleatoria 
1 Like
Always fascinating to learn more about music genre genealogy…
1 Like
I have to say, I never had much exposure to DnB, but ever since this Scaler forum and Davide’s background, I have become ever more fascinated by this genre, and learned to like it… (coming more from the techno/trance genre as a fan)
I grew musically with this…
Sven Väth | “Hot & Melty” Clubnight (23.07.1994) (Techno/Trance Classics) - YouTube
DJ DAG | hr3 Clubnight Volume 1 | 24 Clubnight Classics (1997) - YouTube
This is Pete Namlook Vol.1 | The Art of Ambient Music - YouTube
Torsten Fenslau | “Kult Clubnight” DJ Mix (25.09.1993) (Techno/Trance Classics) - YouTube
Agreed! You may need to hit that “Go” button a few times but you quickly end up with something usable.
Depends what you mean by better.
One thing this can do is get us to explore new possibilities. The list of scales is still limited and setting the chord generation to “exotic” doesn’t necessarily produce crazy results. Yet it’s a way to move out of some habits.
For those of us who never really developed composing skills, being able to create and curate simple tracks may have a more lasting effect than what you describe. When we listen to some of these lines, we notice things we would have a hard time noticing otherwise. “Oh, such a simple line can work well in this context…” To me, personally, it’s partly about simplification.
(Technically, I started playing music 38 years ago, in middle school. Went to music school a few years later. Dabbled in electroacoustic composition. Mostly practiced my instrument (classical saxophone) and learnt about diverse aspects of mainstream music theory. After that, I went into anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore. Played in a variety of situations, from Malian hunters’ music and salsa to concert band and musicals. Never developed skills as a melodist nor, sadly enough, as a Jazz improviser. At this point, I’m finding deep joy in diverse approaches to music which include different ways to interact with computers. It keeps opening my ears.)
2 Likes
Well, I consider these tools as what they are : tools.
Imagine a photographer with an old argentic camera. He discovers a digital camera that allows him to automate some aspects of taking photos. He also discover he can do a panoramic “stitching” with his new toy. It’s still him who decides what to use of what is offered by his tool. And he is still considered as a photographer.
So, if someone uses an AI or other tool in his composing, he still decides what to use of it. He can be inspired by the result of the tool, he can use and reuse some pieces, but finally he will add a bass line or a melody on his guitar or synth. So is he 30% or 75% composer seems to me irrelevant. He used something and made something new. Scales and chordsets are finite and however combining them and adding our ideas, even if only 10%, changes completely what was offered by the tool. I would tell this could be called composing. Did Bach invent new scales? Or Mozart, or Monteverdi, just to name a few. Nope. He used what existed before him and changed, enriched. So, this may be better, or not, depending on what you get. As long as you change something in what tool offers you, i would say it’s composing.
5 Likes
I posted here before about how Mozart created his systems of Musikalisches Wurfelspiel, in which he listed out fragments of music (aka a ‘clip’) and then put them together randomly to see if anything useful came out. There is some evidence (not strong) that he selected each fragment et by rolling dice.
So it seems to me that users of Insta, Captain, BIAB etc are in good company. Rather than just a talent-less nerd pressing ‘generate’, some say he was quite a reasonable musician.
In fact, I’m pretty sure if he were alive today, he would have been an avid Scaler user.
Postscript … Quite a few years ago a guy applied for a job with me (I was in the software business) . He had a PhD from Oxford in Music, and an accomplished piano player, who performed in converts round Europe.
I asked him why he would want to join us, and he replied that unless you were in the top 0.001 % of piano players, he realised that he was never going to earn any serious money, but he figured that getting into Java and banking was a much better bet (he was right…)
I took him on, and occasionally at a Christmas do. he would give us a tune. What surprised me though, was that it was all ‘learned’ . If you would have said to him "lets have a ii-V-I jam in Eb, he wouldn’t have a clue, but one of my other guys who couldn’t read a note could happily improvise for hours.
What’s a musician ?
7 Likes
…and have fun doing it.
We’re in an interesting situation, at this point. There’s been a high degree of professionalization of musicianship… with a tiny proportion of people making music their profession and a small proportion of that with music creation or performance as the main source of income. Which means that we can have a strong notion of who a “real musician” should be without that notion matching what’s happening with music worldwide.
At the same time, many people have forgotten the value of diverse approaches to “musicking”. Yes, jamming at a party. Singing karaoke in a bar. Playing music in a church. Whistling a tune while walking down the street. Banging drums at a gathering. Creating playlists for workouts. Adapting a tune to celebrate a friend. Knocking on cans while listening to a rock band…
We’re all musickers. Some of us enjoy it more than others.
3 Likes
Well, Messiaen did.
Your point is well taken. And creativity comes in different forms. Inventing new tools (from music software to new approaches to harmony) is itself creative. And these tools lead to more creativity. There might be a risk that we end up standardizing things too much (that’s been a vast discussion with the current generation of advanced Generative AI tools). By recognizing some limits and occasionally overcoming some of them, we’re able to avoid some of those effects.
And something important, here, is that there are assumptions made when tools are designed. Many of the tools created around the Common Practice Period have put artificial limits on what music can be. Those were really sophisticated in terms of tonality and harmony, yet unsophisticated in terms of many other factors (including timbre, timing, and tuning). To this day, what is called “theory” in music largely relies on the same set of ideas. Lots of it is quite direct in its assessment of what is “good” or “bad” music (at a given time).
While we’re largely past that, music instruction often refers to those same ideas. Sometimes, it even attempts (clumsily) to describe unrelated musical activities using those “principles”. It gets weird. It’d be like using Escoffier’s culinary guide to explain Indonesian cuisine.
Now, Scaler 2 is largely based on a set of ideas which aren’t that far from those of the Common Practice Period. At the same time, the tool is rather flexible and we do use it in ways which would have disappointed Schenker. Not to mention that, in the end, the notes themselves are just a small part of the music we create.
1 Like
Today I received a very interesting article about ethics aspect of AI-Generated art by Phil Steele, photographer and photo trainer that I follow since years.
Disclaimer: This is not about the tools where the artist is largely involved in the creation process and the program just helps him to start or finish a song or to fill a missing part, such as InstaComposer or Scaler in our case. This is rather about the “art” (with or without double quotes, according to your liking) made completely by training an AI tool without even clicking on the camera.
The equivalent in our musical world would be a tool where you would say: Start on organ like in Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to which you add a heavy riff in 6/8 on Fender Precision Bass for 12 bars and then a solo resembling to David Gilmour’s Comfortably Numb accompanied by Hammond B3 in the style of Jimmy Smith and a very calm finish reminding vacation at the seaside somewhere in Southern Italy. In the middle part add some Greek motifs and in the last 16 bars use polka played as on the Octoberfest, etc. Then just press Enter on your keyboard and wait for a monsterpiece to be finished. 
1 Like
That reminds me of my brother, who responded very dismissively when I proudly showed him a very complex synth preset which I carefully had sound designed for several weeks, so that just by pressing a single key, a whole ambient piece of several minutes evolved out of that single note ( it is an art form, single note presets as whole songs). So he just dismissed it as “all you did was press a single key, no big deal”. So I reset the synth to its default single sine wave oscillator and turned the keyboard to my brother and invited him to do that which he thought was so easy. He pressed a key, and to his chagrin all that came out was BEEP. 
5 Likes
Hi,
I’m new to this forum and glad to join! I have been using Scaler for 2 or 3 years and I regularly test the composition help plugins (ChordPotion, MelodySauce…)
Coming back to the original question.
Instacomposer was giving me a problem that was not solved by version 2. At least, I didn’t find a solution but maybe it exists and I didn’t see it!
The problem is that when you build a chord progression and you have generated for example a melody or a bass line, it is then impossible to modify the chord progression without losing the melody.
For example, I build this awesome progression: C F C (I’m very proud of that !
Then I click ten times on the GO of Instacomposer and I end up coming across a melody that I like.
And then I tell myself that a C G C chord progression would be much better. So I change the F to G and there: nothing! The melody (or bass or riff…) does not fit the new chord.
Of course, I can go modify that in the editor. But if I have a chord sequence that’s a bit longer and a bit more complex than C F C, it’s going to take longer than doing it directly in the DAW.
The other solution is to press GO again. In this case the new chord will be taken into account but the structure (sequence of notes) which I liked is lost.
So, I couldn’t find any way to quickly change a chord progression while maintaining the notes structure.
When working on a new composition, nothing is set in stone from the start (at least as far as I’m concerned). I have to be able to test rhythms, melodic lines, arpeggios, ostinati… and of course develop a chord progression. What Scaler makes it very easy to do. But not Instacomposer version 1 or 2.
Therefore, I’ve never used Instacomposer 1 and I’m afraid I won’t use Instacomposer 2 any more.
Hi @HERVE
Welcome to the forum. I think the only way to achieve this is
on InstaComposer 1 to drag the tracks that you want to keep into your DAW before before clicking on the GO button,
or select individual tracks and click on GO. In the example bellow I have clicked on 2
This will generate a new track 2
On InstaComposer 2 copy Scene 1 into Scene 2 by right-clicking on Scene 1 and selecting Copy Scene from the context menu
Right-lick on Scene 2 and select Paste Scene to paste a copy of Scene 1 into Scene 2.
Now, with Scene 2 selected you can generate variations on Scene 1 without affecting Scene 1. In the example below I have changed Track 2 to an Ostinato, and then selected Track 2 and clicked on GO
For me, the biggest issue with InstaComposer 2 is that I have to enter the chords manually, I cannot drag a midi file in and generate parts from it’ and I have no control over what it generates.
Having said this I believe it can help some people when they are stuck for inspiration.
2 Likes
On the more general discussion about musicianship and composition this reminds me of the 1960’s when Wendy Carlos released the album Switched On Bach, and the discussions about 20th century compositions
There was (I seem to remember) some heated discussion about the merits of arranging Bach music for synthesizers!
I believe that if the tools were available, then many of the most revered composers would avail themselves of the tools.
IMHO when using tools such as Scaler 2 or InstaComposer 2 the musicianship is in selecting the output that is relevant for the piece that you are composing. Scaler 2 is great for developing a harmonic theme whilst InstaComposer 2 can then generate motifs and phrases and parts for that theme as can Chordpotion.
Or I can compose a motif on my piano or in Chordpotion and then detect it with Scaler 2 to identify possible keys and scales to harmonise it. And then I am composing.
1 Like
I agree!
And this is why I changed my original nickname “composer” to “mousier” or “jammer”
I am unable to compose anything: I just put tools together (like Lego little bricks) to see what happens
And I don’t consider myself a musician because I am unable to read a score, to sol-fa, and to play any instrument, but the doorbell
P.S: @jjfagot is a “composer” but he abandoned this forum
It’s a shame because he was a great teacher and helper, also with wannabe composers, and he was also always able to fall in with the joke (a quality I love)
1 Like