Video using Improvisator to Improve Scaler - Watch this

Scaler 2 Feature Requests
23

Hi @ed66

Thanks a million for your response. What I am advocating is a few features from my improvisator hack, which, when combined, make for a creative process that is much more dynamic and inspired.

Forgive anything that comes off as pedantic here…I’d just like to explain as thoroughly as possible why this improvisator hack would be a huge boost for scaler in the world of pros & trained composers:

Having a page that is like my improvisator hack, where any chord in any can be immediately played with velocity sensitivity, and then, once played, all of the suspensions, alterations, and altered bass notes of that chord can then be accessed and played before moving to the next chord, is extremely powerful, and why I created the hack:

The hack allows me not just to organize and arrange my compositions as scaler does, but compose more dynamically and musically. Here’s what I mean:

When I was composing for Tom & Jerry Tales, I was composing 30 minutes of wall-to-wall orchestra per week (no dialogue…all music…yikes!) As when many other trained composers work, I’m typically writing first in an inspired way: not just playing static chords, but moving through chord ideas live, playing them with dynamics and sensitivity on piano/guitar, etc. i try ideas by playing them dynamically…not just by clicking-dragging-seeing how a static chord sounds. While the little performance options, etc in scaler are probably fun and inspiring for untrained musicians or producers who can’t play, they are not as helpful for professional musicians and composers who have training that is a bit more formidable. What would be much more helpful is accessing dynamics: When I’m writing, if i play a passing chord quietly, it may work, and i’ll keep the idea. if i hear the passing chord statically as with every other chord, it may not be inspired, or work at all. This is because the dynamics of live writing, not just with melody, but with harmony too, are a huge part of writing. In addition, if I want to suspend or alter the chord next, and can play it immediately, with dynamics, the inspiration continues. If i first have to pause/navigate/click/drag/listen to a static volume, then, while it might be exciting for a novice who can’t play the chord in the first place, for the pro, the inspiration is quickly strangled. This is why John Williams, who we all know is so incredible, writes such memorable pieces. Watch the little jewel of footage of him with Speilberg on youtube writing for ET…he plays dynamically, live, then jettisons ideas to try others, as dynamically as possible, until he reaches something truly inspired. Only then does he go to paper (or in hopefully our case, the other parts of scaler!) and starts arranging. With the improvisator hack I’ve crated, this dynamic process is then possible with every chord, binded to single keys: when inspiration hits, I can try ideas and nurture the creative process in the most ‘live & dynamic’ setting possible - if it’s added to scaler, I can then then plug them right into the arranging process :slight_smile:

My though would not be to have a single page gui for scaler, but this:

A full dynamic performance chord page (basically my hack) the user can tab to that works exactly like my improvisator hack: so the user can, when inspiration hits, go live & dynamic with any chord and it’s suspensions or alterations, keep the inspiration going, then navigate the chords back to the rest of the scaler GUI for clicking & dragging to arrange & sculpt. It’s essentially just making my hack a page, so it can be used like it’s used in the video :slight_smile:

For pro musicians, this would be very powerful, and it’s why I’m finding myself using the improvisator hack with midi capture in ableton much more than scaler these days. To have that page in scaler would make it a singular, beast-of-a-tool for the professional composing community that is trained in music.

Let me know if anything isn’t completely clear, @ed66 (i’m typing this on an iphone in a plane, so there may be typos:)

Keep up the great work…Scaler has great potential not just for the novice musician or semi-trained producer, but for pros, as well. Having come from Media Ventures & Hans Zimmer’s crew, there are a large group of composers that look to me for tools i recommend. That one page would convert me from an occasional user to a full endorsement of Scaler, and they would all follow suit. Once you’ve got them, you’ve got everybody :wink:

You’re all doing great work; I’m excited to see what you all cook up next :+1:

3 Likes
24

thanks for explanation @terbano

I don’t think I can understand all you said, because I am not a composer
I am rather an amateur having fun jamming and testing
(not up to editing or programming anyway :cold_face:)

another folk here called this condition “mousier” :mouse: and I think it’s the perfect word
:grin:

so I realize your thinking is odd but sensible :grinning:

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Cool @ClaudioPorcellana ! I’m happy to read that Scaler is helpful for you too. We odd musicians must all stick together :grin:

1 Like
26

Thanks for your detailed explanation. Don’t apologise for

In my experience that is the sort of detail that helps the devs understand your ideas. When I first saw the video I thought “well with Scaler set to detect midi, if I play my keyboard I record the chords in Scaler; so what?” But now I think I understand what you were driving at.

As I say above, I think Scaler does some of this already but not the dynamics (which hopefully are coming) or on a single page. To reiterate my first response, dynamics have been discussed and hopefully is on the roadmap for Scaler’s development (Scaler 3?). I don’t know if Scaler can be redesigned to be more supportive of your workflow, but I am sure that the devs are considering ways of improving the workflows through Scaler.

I don’t know if you have tried his but Setting Scaler to detect midi and playing the keyboard will record the chords you play, I f you then drag them into section C, right-click on a chord and select EDIT Chord from the context menu you will be taken to the EDIT page where you can see the extensions. Not ideal, and not as real-time as your hack but a start.

One final point on Speilberg/Williams and ET. I think I found the video to which you refer. In it Williams starts by composing the melody,and then adds the harmony. Scaler can help do this by detecting the melody and suggesting the scales that support the melody.

Anyway, am sure it will give the devs some food for thought.

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@terbano

I’ve beenthinking about this whilst out on my morning walk and would like to make a suggestion about how Scaler could be developed to accommodate this functionality.

On the video you are using Improvisator to identify the chords that you are playing. This is currently available in Scaler (detect into SectionA) bugt without the dynamics.

If Scaler also recorded the dynamics (velocity and length of time chord is held) with each chord that is played the user could then either

  • select the chords they want from the recording in Section A and drag them into Section C, ignoring the chords that aren’t desired to form a pattern, and then drag the pattern from Section C into midi;

or

  • drag the chords directly form Section A into a midi clip.

I think that this would meet your requirement?

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great, I styled the tool graphically back then, must have been around 2008 - nice that it’s still being used :slight_smile:

2 Likes
29

Hi ed66, thanks for this. Yes, I’ve noodled around with playing MIDI into Scaler when I want to suspend a chord or alternate quickly, etc., but there are messy implications to that that make it very clunky (there’s the losing the key, but mainly it’s just a clunky, clicking back & forth sequence that is cumbersome, which kills the point of using software like this)

I can hack the lack of dynamics a bit in a complex ableton template, using midi translator pro and multiple iac MIDI tracks to separate notes and velocity, and rejoin them on an iac track to my instrument. But going back and forth between recording MIDI into scaler just to get the occasional suspension or alteration I want is pretty useless because it’s, well, slow and clunky :slight_smile:

Even without the velocity though, the real key is having a chord page that’s bindable to all the keys on a keyboard like my improvisator hack. Not having this is where you lose a large part of the pro community. We would be interested in using scaler as a tool to speed up the space between experimentation, arranging and writing. But not being able to get to every alteration, suspension, etc in one page is where it gets killed, and would even insult a lot of musicians and composers who either already know theory, or just know what chord they want next :slight_smile: A suggestion here or there is fine, but many people, novices included, have points in the writing process where they either know exactly what chord they want next, or just want to experiment live between any chord. For professionals, it’s more often…so not being able to tab to a page, get to any chord in 1 click, then drop it into the arrangement in the next, would be a deal breaker for the pro composer folks. And it’s why I’m using the improvisator hack all the time now, and putting a lot of time into encouraging the scaler team to utilize it fully - because the combination if the 2 is powerful, and would make scaler a 1-stop-shop for writing, experimentation and arranging on all levels.

Ah, got it on the video. to clarify a bit, the Speilberg/Williams video was just to use an example of how dynamics and experimentation are an important part of the writing and arranging process, but don’t necessarily live right at the beginning of the process - they live somewhere between the beginning and the middle. Being able to tab to a binded chord page to play/grab anything would solve most of this. The composer could then freely move between the arrangement and experimentation between 2 tabbed pages of the GUI, and it would be golden: not just an exciting helper for novice composers, but an extension of a composer’s brain :slight_smile:

I’m trying my best to grasp the resistance to having a chord page in a program thats for arrangement - there is no ego in writing that, it’s just really the truth. There are a lot of composers who appreciate chord suggestions, etc, but don’t want to be forced through a series of either suggestions or clicks/sections of the gui for limited choices when there is a chord they already know they want, or when they just want to experiment with ideas, which is one of the most important parts of writing original work. Scaler could put it on a separate page to tab to. It seems to me this would be quick work. With that addition, I’d be on board fully, and a ton of established composers at the higher end of tv and film would follow :wink:

Keep up the great work!
T

30

It was a good hour of hacking around to get it going, but now it’s as easy as pie and deadly-useful! :slight_smile:

31

I don’t think thatthere is a resistance to having a chord page, but rather a several people have different ideas of what this means, and maybe it represents a philosphical change to how Scaler can be used by different users.

Anyway, enough of this philosophical argument, lets see if the dev team picks this up.

32

Fair enough. If you folks ever want to do a whatsapp video call, I could show the dev team a bunch of this stuff in real time - the video is just scratching the surface :slight_smile:

33

I’m not sure how asking for a chord page is philosophical, but I think I hear you :wink:

34

why not?
https://chordify.net/chords/immanuel-kant-song-gottfried-leibniz

:grin:

35

I think they are all good ideas and the easiest way to implement this is to create a new modulation preset called ‘Improvise’ which basically does this. We have some plans in play for a very similar approach which won’t be available until a next major iterations but there is a possibility to have something in there sooner that allows for this, needs some thought on how you capture / record it and how it plays with the current ecosystem. Stay tuned and thanks for feedback.
PS - Scaler does currently use 0-127 velocity both on it’s chord boxes and as a controller.

2 Likes
36

Love this, @davide - Very much appreciate the continued attention to user feedback. My thought would be to have the ‘Improvise’ page be live & mapped across the whole keyboard when initially tabbed to (I’m happy to share the keymap I created for the Improvisator hack - it’s actually arranged very logically, both with keyswitches to change the key, and all chord roots/suspensions/genders/dominants/subdominants/diminished mapped to very logical and easy-to-memorize map across a keyboard. It’s burned in after a few short noodles with it.

Keep up the great work

37

What will you say about it

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What did you start? LOL…
Well you made a big suggestion to an application that a lot of folks really love.
Big surprise that some folks will get impassioned with their response and then other will jump on the bandwagon wanting to bang on about everything they see that is wrong with the software.

I actually like your idea and have felt the same way about Scaler in some instances. I also know there are other applications out there, some of which are more similar to what you’re showing. I tend to just use another tool frankly. But no harm in demonstrating what you think is missing from Scaler.

But I will say, it doesn’t matter which section of the site you post in, if someone makes a suggestion for a feature it’s also fair game for others to say I don’t see the need or have no use for the feature or suggest another tool that already does that, etc…

That should be expected really.

39

To anyone else who’s feelings I deeply hurt, I’m truly sorry. Haha! Yikes!
Yes, I agree: there’s no harm in suggesting what’s missing from Scaler in a forum for suggesting what’s missing from Scaler :slight_smile: Thanks!

1 Like