Would love to see Midi-Phrase-Browsing similar to EZKeys

I would love to see a Midi-Phrases in different Music-Styles.
Easy to browse through like in EZ-Keys. Everything in the way select Phrases and Performances feels very difficult. The pulldown Menu selection with the different italian names couldn’t be more unintuitive.
I think there could be a performance page with a clear and straightforward browser and an easy way to see and pre-listening to the different phrases with categories like e.g. “Contemporary Soul”, “Blues”, “Latin”, “Progressive Rock”, “Reggae” etc. in addition to the already established classical naming.
The ease of pre-listening is also very important. To be able to select between different phrases just with an up and down key would be a major improvement.

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Hey Chris
While not particularly intuitive, there is a simple way to use your up/down keys to move through the Perform mode content while you are looping a chord or progression. Certainly not a midi-browser, but it might help while we wait. :slight_smile:

Simple Version; The key is to keep that list UI widget in focus after you’ve made a specific pattern selection.
With Perform activated and the loop playing [very important], select the pattern group (my term not Scaler’s) w/in Expression or Articulation (Performance, Bass, etc) you want and then click on the highest level menu/list “Pattern family” (the one that shows up on your toolbar) twice…once to open the menu and then the second click keeps the focus on that list but lets your keyboard advance up and down with out hitting enter. You can also just select a specific pattern but do not click anywhere else. The key is to keep that list UI widget in focus so have your chord pattern looping before you select your Perform pattern family. I’ve played every pattern in Scaler w/in just a few minutes

Here I’d just click on Accento (twice) and now I can move through all the patterns (under Accento) with my up/down buttons. To move to the next pattern group, you’d need to select a different top level pattern group.

image

A little more detailed description is here: Performance examples and favorites? - #4 by 1stInversion

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Thank you very much. That was really helpful. :+1:

Yes, this is super helpful! Especially upon finding out that this method works for any of the menu selections, even the Artists, Scales, and Songs sections.

I’ve setup 8 bars of rising through the notes C2-C3 in my DAW, in order to trigger the linked Scaler chords in the currently active progression. Then I hit play in DAW, while browsing through the different artists, songs, scales sections with @TMacD 's method - and I have stumbled over more than one happy accident, discovering chord progressions between the shift of different artists/songs/scales as they were playing in this method :slight_smile:

Great to hear…your approach was pretty much exactly what got me sucked into this very cool part of Scaler. The happy accidents just keep rolling out. This, combined with Scalers pretty much unlimited MIDI record feature, makes catching those accidents easy.

For an extra dimension I add a VST instrument (something with a pretty big soundscape like Pigments) and cycle through the presets while also cycling the Scaler Patterns. I take your setup and have both a Scaler and a linked VST instrument visible. With both UIs up, I can quickly toggle between different sounds and patterns seamlessly (using a rest in my pattern). I’m a bit of a noob at this stuff and I’m constantly amazed how the patterns combined with different instruments and presets w/in those instruments can create such a range of sounds and music. Since you can also seamlessly change voicing and timing details in the pattern editor while the pattern is playing, the options feel limitless and I can quickly and easily explore for hours on end. Damn you Scaler! :slight_smile:

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Yes! Exactly that! That is me! :slight_smile:

For an extra dimension I add a VST instrument (something with a pretty big soundscape like Pigments) and cycle through the presets while also cycling the Scaler Patterns. I take your setup and have both a Scaler and a linked VST instrument visible. With both UIs up, I can quickly toggle between different sounds and patterns seamlessly (using a rest in my pattern). I’m a bit of a noob at this stuff and I’m constantly amazed how the patterns combined with different instruments and presets w/in those instruments can create such a range of sounds and music. Since you can also seamlessly change voicing and timing details in the pattern editor while the pattern is playing, the options feel limitless and I can quickly and easily explore for hours on end.

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I am likewise unhappy with all the Italian words. I have no idea what any of them mean, so find myself resorting to guesswork, and then trying to remember which ones did what.

I’ve lately, by contrast, been deeply enjoying your Carbon Electra synth. Everything clearly laid out, no confusion.

Even if it’s just an option for those of us with no Italian clues, please consider some way of making it clearer what all those terms mean.

Thank you.

Hi @adrian

I don’t understand them either, and I am Italian…
:rofl:

I suspect they are in the classical-music style, so classic musicians should understand them perfectly

cheers

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Might I suggest one could just take a bit of time and learn what the Italian words mean? I mean it’s only a handful, no one is asking you to become fluent in Italian. And frankly understanding these words will only help your understanding of music theory. A few minutes of a google search for each word and then write down their meanings does it for me. If you’re not the fastest memorizer like myself, make yourself a simple cheat sheet and just keep it handy on your desktop. Just my suggestion.

Of course this is a way to approach it. But this forum is also about improving the user experience of scaler. Making the different performances more accessible and their descriptions more meaningful to a large part of the users might be a thing the developers can work on, regardless of the workarounds the users can come up with.

Neighter English nor Italian is my native language so whether a performance pattern is labeled “Adagio Accento” or “Rather slow with some accentuation applied” makes zero difference to me - me and couple billions of fellow non-english-natives have to google stuff up. Italian one sound fancier :rofl: but if it gets translated to English - no big deal.
What puzzles me though is: how would you describe ie “Adagio Accento” in English so that it is easy to understand for beginner and allow them to imagine how the pattern might sound like (w/o listening to it)?

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Here is some useful stuff:
One musical glossary
Another musical glossary
A third bigger musical glossary
Another musical glossary with links to samples
I think you can find more googling

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To pick up on the initial spirit of making product feature suggestions, it seems reasonable to request a better user experience for previewing expression/performance styles (be it more real-time audio, akin to how Komplete Kontrol lets you preview the sound presets), or with a visual similar to a mini piano roll (fair to assume that most DAW using musicians would be familiar with that UI paradigm?). Now the timeline, version roadmap (and cost) could be debated. In engineering we say “Cheap? Fast? Good? You can only have two at the same time” :slight_smile:

I requested something similar to this back in May.

By the way, the Italian musical terms used to name the phrases have nothing to do with the musical make up of the phrases.

OOPS!
Never noticed it :astonished:
but I never mind those names: I simply browse through all patterns until my ears listen something interesting

yes. agree. that is really the only way to sort through them. it would be nice if there were another option that could help speed up the process rather than listening to each one by one

You can use the arrow up down keys to go through one at a time. Slow but necessary. How do you guys deal with a new synth or sample library with lots of presets? You can only know what they sound like by going through them one at a time.

Presets in synth or samplers are sorted in easy to distinguish categories. Pads, Bass, Leads, Keys, Organs etc. Some Browsers give you the ability to sort by other factors. Like atmospheric, distorted, modulated etc.
Plus certain names give you a lot of information “Squelchy Funk Lead” or “Moving Filter Pad” give you enough information to decide without the need to listen to every sound.You don’t need to go through them to get what you need.

Interesting discussion,

I think adding tags and the ability to filter will help a lot. The ability to like/favorite chordsets and expressions for quick access will be added as well.

This is true, and the tagging, might not solve everything. Melodies are particularly tricky because they can work in a lot of contexts and across many genres. There’s also the risk of missing content because it’s mislabeled or sits under “disco” and I might skip it when in a different mood.

If you have to go through them all one by one, what are you expecting to find when you click next?
What are you looking for? Something that sounds similar in terms of notes played? Same speed? Or the same dynamics? etc…There are lots of questions and lots of different workflows.

If we are to open Scaler with the ability to add user-generated content, there is going to be a need for something that helps us stay creative and find the content we are looking for. Not everybody wants to listen to unrelated melody back to back for hours.

Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile:

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I think it is very good news that you are working on the favorites options above all
As for the names that appear to designate the performances, as a musician I have to say that the names do not always correspond to the supposed speed; although I don’t exactly think about speeds when I choose one either, since a performance in Adagio can be played fast at x2 and faster in the DAW and another one from Vivace can also be played slower with x 0.5 and less speed in the DAW. I find more accurate the way in which arpeggios are named, or strumms for example, or the scales in which they are associated with moods or use in certain styles.
Perhaps the perfomances can take a similar path, I think.
Either way, there is a lot of subjective in all that work, and for that reason it must be complicated. The best, for me, is the option to save favorites. Thanks for your work, Ed1

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