Just saw a video about SCALER on YouTube. The video itself and the discussion below, I thought it was good, so I forwarded it here again. Interested friends, you can take a look together.
Some good ideas in there.
1 Like
I dropped my 2 wanted features 
Itās clear from this board that Scaler has a growing user base with broad diversity in the nature of their usage, the role of music in their lives, the genres they follow, their music skills and so on.
Some folk want Scaler to be more like a DAW; some want more sounds, others have no interest in that; some would more progression content, others more performance content. and so on.
What this indicates to me is Scalerās success in capturing such a wide and diverse range of musicians across a wide spectrum.
It also means that it is highly unlikely that whatever V3.0 brings will result in universal acclaim, in that (as politicians and app designers know well) you canāt please all of the people all of the time. @davide and team have a difficult if not impossible task to find the optimal path for getting as many cheers as possible.
So whatās the answer for v3.0 ? My (very personal) take is that @davide and co have a musical vision, and insofar as this has been articulated thus far, itās one Iām happy to subscribe to; Iāll take whatever comes if it helps me develop my current paucity of skills.
One reason for that ālaisse faireā approach is that most requests so far are incremental extrapolations to what already exists. But Scaler didnāt arrive as a āme tooā product, it took a more innovative approach to what it delivered. It would be entirely in keeping with that if V3 (or V4 or whatever) came with surprise aspects that hadnāt yet been proposed or thought about - left field functions - pushing further with the ācomposer withinā philosophy it originally embodied.
4 Likes
Do we really want more instruments in Scaler? I am worried that this will result in bloatware, increased development compexity and cost, for what benefit? I know some users use Scaler as a perfomance tool, but can they not use Scaler with external instruments for these performances?
Having two versions of Scaler (with and without an instrument set) sounds logical, but complex? I leave that to the developers to figure out (I like simplicity in applications: remeber that in trying to satisfy everyone usually results in satisfying no-one).
I see the current set of instruments basically being good for auditioning an arrangement (rather like the Cakewalk TTS synthesizer).
I would like to add one feature, which I have already added to the Feature Requests topic.
I would like to be able to save and import Chord sets with any Edits to the chord set: transposition, inversions, timings. performance playback, which have been set in the EDIT page.
At present there are two options for saving and importing:Save State or Save Chord Set. However if you import a saved state the import is destructive and clears the existing state before importing the new state. Thus any edit or existing chord seta are lost, so it is impossible to add to an eisting project.
Alternatively if you have simply saved the chord set and then import it you can add to an existing project, but there are no edits that may have been associated with the chord set. So if you compose a nice phrase that you want to save, because it does not quite fit into current song you have to save the state to save any edits. I believe that many composers draft several vesions of a phrase before settling on a final phrase in a composition. However they may not completly discard the unused phrases, they can be used in other songs.
The second feature I would like to propose is for the user to be able to programme complex arpeggios or motifs. I realise that this is significantly expanding functionality and may be complex to develop so I see this as a ānice to haveā request.
7 Likes
I agree that more instruments or multi-layered instruments would be an overkill. So, yes the possibility to unload instruments would be welcome.
I stiill prefer Scaler as progression builder plugin used with other VSTs in my DAW, relatively light, but with more options to help composing , as i mentioned in one of my posts some time ago , to organize chords in sections e.g verse , bridge , chorus etc. with a flexible number of chords per row and greater limit of number of rows.
I find interesting the idea to add more instrument types in Performance section e.g. piano, drums, violinā¦ as we already have for Bass.
I would also like to have more progressions by artists, such as Genesis , Pink Floyd or so. Some classic Rock and more Prog Rock.
In conclusion for those who prefer live playing , why not developing a standalone version, but for us who use Scaler in a DAW, I would like it light and really progression and composing oriented.
2 Likes
You (and me) are a bit biased he he
2 Likes
I would like the modulation section revamped, as I find it confusing af, even with the demo video.
Also would like the option to view two scales side by side when trying to come up with progressions.
I trust the devs to know what is best for the direction they are wanting to go. They are smart and they listen to suggestions but they know what they are doing. So far, as long as I take the time to really learn the software, Iāve been able to do most things I need. Looking forward to v 3. It will be exciting.
2 Likes
i finally created an account just to comment on this in case any devs happen to read it. i donāt think scaler needs to be anything more than what it already is, but expanding on those core functions will make it even better.
- audiomodern chordjam has a great feature that scaler could likely easily adapt. you select a root note, scale, and chord type ā and your whole midi keyboard becomes all of the chords in that scale going up/down octaves as allowed by your keyboard. you arenāt limited by 7 or 9 chords as you are in scaler. for someone like me that goes more off of ear, this feature gets me creating chord progressions quickly.
- the suggest feature is super cool. if that could somehow be tied to #1, or if there was a way to eliminate chords we donāt like and the suggestion algorithm keeps providing chords to your keyboard.
- now that youāve got the sounds/chords you like, it would be great to have a better way to record (or convert) the notes that are played. for example, note C3 is playing CMaj, it would be great to have those 3 notes recorded as opposed to just one. my workflow generally has me putting the actual note data on the instrument channels instead of leaving it in the scaler channel and routing the output to the input of the instrument. im not a fan of managing 2 instances of a instrument + scaler for everything. there are just too many things that can go wrong, be misnamed, etc.
3 Likes
Welcome to the community @wavydave and thanks for feedback. We are always reading the posts here and I tend to agree with peopleās feedback. As I have mentioned before the greatest challenge is offering features users didnāt realise they wanted or needed vs making everything instantly familiar. Itās a longer road than we had anticipated but ultimately everything needs to be and sound wonderful for the end user - all without extra padding and fluff!
7 Likes
But when you experiment there are so many wonderful, unexpected things that can go right.
Honeslty stability is my most desired 3.0 feature.
The features the program already have are quite impressive.
THis isnāt to say that I couldnāt rattle off a number of nice enhancements, etc. But the reality is Scaler, while it is my favorite VST (out of over 1400 of them). It is also one of the only program that seems to want to crash my DAW with some frequency.
Letās figure it out. Whatās different about your system that is different then the hundreds and hundreds of others that donāt crash.
What is you OS?
What is your DAW?
What is you Computer set up?
1 Like
I run multiple machines, all most up to date Scaler version and Windows 10 builds.
DAW is Cakewalk (run the latest build)
Crashing has been in issue since Scaler 1 and continued to Scaler 2.
It doesnāt happen āall the timeā but it is frequent enough that Iād call it an issue. Again, none of my other plugins seem to have this problem and I have a lot of them.
And respectfully, there are a number of other users that do experince crashes with the Scaler/Cakewalk combo as Iām a frequent poster on the Cakewalk forum.
Main computer is a custom build, older gen I3 with Nvidia Graphics and 16 GIGs of ram.
Other computers are various Lenovo i5 ThinkPads with between 16 and 32 gigs of RAM per machine.
The first thing that strikes me and you seem to confirm is the commonality of Calkwalk being the DAW that is crashing in all cases including many on the Cakewalk forum. So, that being the case, just out of curiosity, is there anything in common that happens when there is a crash? I assume youāve sent the crash reports to the Scaler Devs so they can have a look?
It can crash when Scaler is the only VSTs running. I sent crash reports to Cakewalk and they of course confirmed Scaler was causing it. I honestly donāt remember if I sent Crash dumps to Scaler direclty or not.
Iāve never yet had Scaler bring down my DAW, although the vast majority of the time I am using Live. However, I do have Cakewalk (latest version) which I do use from time to time, but have not experienced any problems with this.
Iāve just searched the posts for all those containing the word āCakewalkā, and there are 3 which mention a crash .
There were several reports relating to dragging and dropping in Cakewalk, reported by @Trankonia, @RedFox, @Slharder and others.
However, there are more crash reports in other DAWs (including Live) than Cakewalk, but that probably is simply a result of the distribution of DAW usage here. They were not always for the same reason.
Iāve been a Cakewalk / Sonar user for 20+ years after buying v2.1 on floppy discs (!) and they were very late to the VST party, having instead used their own DXi approach. It is therefore conceivable that the lack of stability you mention may have some bearing on that. although you say other VSTās have not given any problems.
Iād be happy to help by running test on my machine to try and replicate any repeatable crash scenarios you can specify Hopefully itās possible to do this as the crashes occur with Scaler alone, so it is some Scaler / Cakewalk interaction. If I canāt reproduce them, then that might point to some specific Scaler / machine interaction. Let me know if you want to do this.
My config is Asus Z390 mobo ; i9-9900 clocked to 4.9Ghz ;32 Gb Corsair ; Radeon W3100 duel video using DP4; Samsung EVO 970 M2 SSD ; Windows 10 Pro.
Having been in the software business for rather a long time, it is a characteristic of all service desks (and not just in software) to punt back error reports by blaming something else unless it can obviously be parked on them ā¦ but that cynical comment aside letās see if it can be reproduced on other gear. Maybe @Trankonia might help ā¦ heās a seasoned cakewalk user.
This is no longer a problem on my system with the latest version of Cakewalk and Scaler.
2 Likes