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

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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They are almost arbitrary, think of them as feel based and loosely put in their respective categories of ‘con amore’ (with love), ‘con fuoco’ (with fire), ‘con moto’ (with motion), ‘con spirito’ (with spirit) to get a feel for why they are in those categories; emotional, lively, rhythmical, ethereal (respectively).

The Performances are from slowest to fastest in their categories, think adagio (slowest), moderato (moderate!), espressivo (expressive) and Vivace (lively). Likewise Rhythms are from slowest to fastest. We could of used 1,2,3,4 but given Italian is used in musical feel and rhythm it made sense to use something as intended. I think what we have planned for future will help greatly and remove the general confusion with the Italian naming!

Excellent and thank you for the help here @TMacD

I get that but CE is just a synth, based on templates that have been around for eons thanks to masters Bob Moog, Dave Smith, Tom Oberheim et all. I was only trying to emulate there. Scaler is its own beast born and bred from raw ideas we all threw into a live burning pot!!!

No need, this is from our stables so here’s a translation of most of them and may help you understand where we were coming from!

Scaler 2 Performance Descriptions Public.pdf (433.8 KB)

ma como sei cattivo!!!

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You are right!
It’s my fault I am not willing to study the basic of classical music
I am sure the teacher @jjfagot would put me out his school
:rofl:

Hahaha In class we do the basics: teach if you don’t know. Attached photo of an old metronome. Now they are all digital, but in these old ones you can see that the nomenclatures for the beats per minute have assigned names, which have always been written in Italian for musicians. They are not that complicated to understand for those of us who speak Latin, but I understand that languages that do not have a Latin origin have some small problem. Anyway, as far as I know, in music schools around the world its meaning was always taught, since otherwise it would be more difficult to interpret the works of Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Vivaldi, and a very long etc. By the way, it seems incredible to me that they wrote so much and so good without having the music programs that we have, hehehe

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I have no problem understanding the non-latin language of Mozart or Bach :wink: Even though I always wondered about why the German scale “B” was an “H”, until I learned that J.S. Bach wanted to see his name in the Scale :wink:

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WOW
I am collecting tons of surprises here
:astonished:

Hi again—thank you, David, and the other contributors on this thread. I appreciate the advice and points of view. I will go and learn some Italian—would you believe that never occurred to me? Yes, thinking about it, it very likely did occur to you! :wink: In any case, I am grateful for the clarity and the kindness. :slight_smile:

Now I want to upvote the idea that future Scaler UI should include an image of this anqique metronome :wink:

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Fascinating thread … I happened to have Spectrasonics Omnisphere up and the patch showing was “Revenge of the Electric Toothbrush”. This is syntax without semantics; it’s English, but I have no idea what it might sound like. In fact, I’d do much better at guessing the Italian tags in Scaler than with American patch naming … and Omnisphere has another 11,999 patches mostly with equally obscure names (said he reaching for his Italian dictionary to get some sanity back from opening Scaler) :roll_eyes:

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