Voice grouping is quite cumbersome and one of the first major annoyance since I recently started using Scaler.
People that already have a good understanding of voice grouping aren’t using Scaler.
98.7% of users just pick a global voicing that sounds the best, then get annoyed the moment they try to edit a chord.
They are many ways to make this simple and intuitive rather than a frustrating limitation and workflow killer:
1) “Apply global voicings to selected chords.”/ “Apply global voicings to active pattern as new pattern (non-destructive).” etc. Then global voice grouping could be disabled and chords edited freely.
2) There’s free GUI space above the MIDI Capture button. Duplicate the voice grouping functionality there. By default it’s linked to the global setting, unlinking allows independent voice grouping per pattern. This would make presets far more useful since it would be simple to create voicing variations for identical chord progressions within the same preset. Users could also save presets with all their favorite voicing options as starting points.
3) Simply allow changing voicings with Global Voicing active using the automatic voicing as the starting point which is what most people are trying to do. The only time a manually changed chord might interfere with the existing global voicing is in dynamic mode, but the algorithm could just ignore the user changes and base the next chords voicing on the unedited version. That way the next chord’s voicing isn’t affected by the changes to the previous one.
4) Treat voice grouping like playback performances, per chord. Just add a voice grouping drop-down for each chord. If it’s not 100% identical and has some quirks this could be a feature, not a bug. If it creates issues for dynamic voicing, refer to above.
5) The functionality limitations seems to be because the chord voicings section in the edit tab occurs before global voice grouping making it useless. Global voicing should occur prior to the chord voicing settings. Whether an inversion or +/- 12 semitones is applied to the original chord or the global voicing output is irrelevant. MIDI is MIDI. We can we add 11 semi-tones to a chord in the edit tabe with global voicing grouping active but the 12 semi-tone somehow becomes impossible?
These are just a few ideas, the most important thing is a straightforward way to use global voice grouping without limiting one of the most important and primary functions of a plugin like Scaler, which is editing chords. If any of these changes break some arcane music theory rule from the 1800’s, nobody cares. If it sounds right to the user, it’s right.
Anyway, I don’t mean to sound overly blunt, it’s a great plugin at a more than fair price. I’d just prefer to be making music than writing another thread expressing frustration with Scaler’s voice grouping.
Thanks!