Baffled by the Scaler 3 for iPadOS Mini Keyboard

I bought the Scaler 3 for iPadOS today and have to say I’m absolutely baffled by its "mini keyboard” when working with chord sets. The most basic thing in the tutorial essentially explained that when you choose the all scales option, you can then tap a key on the mini keyboard to make it the root of the scale, but it doesn’t do that. The list of scales down below flashes momentarily, but it doesn’t change. For example, when the app starts, a C major scale appears to be the default, and when I tap the ‘D’ on the mini keyboard that middle section flashes briefly but nothing changes and no keys on the mini keyboard toggle.

Further fiddling, however, seems to indicate that the proper way to set the root note is actually to press and hold a key, then slide your finger to some other key. Because that leaves the original key on the mini keyboard toggled or lit in a dark blue and also changes the scales displayed in the middle section to be based on that root. If I then tap other keys, they sometimes stay toggled/lit in a light blue by comparison (and I have no idea why they sometimes do and sometimes don’t), and if I repeat the whole press-hold-and-slide-away maneuver then other keys will be toggled/lit in a somewhat darker blue than the keys that only sometimes toggle/light when tapped in lightest blue… There seem to be multiple levels of being “on” for the mini keyboard.

In short, I have zero idea how this works or what rationale is behind all the gestures, especially when the tutorial makes it sound simple: tap a key to pick the root note. I don’t find anything in the manual explaining it, though I suppose it’s possible I missed it. Can anyone explain this baffling set of gestures and how to use the most basic feature of the app?! Thanks.

Ahh! you stumbled on a bug we found too! Will be fixed next week. Somehow snuck in to one of the release candidate betas and was missed by us and our testers. Tip! Right Click will do it as a workaround till next week (click and hold on a key and tap elsewhere) or just use the search function that works too!

I’m so glad to hear I’m not nuts. Glad to hear there will be a fix as well. In the meantime, do you mind if I ask for some clarification on the various levels of blue-ness? In particular, it seems to me like:

  1. Dark blue - the root note of the scale
  2. Medium blue - ?
  3. Light blue - maybe other notes in the scale?

Could you help me complete my understanding there? To my (admittedly old) eyes, there are at least three varying levels of blue, and I’d like to understand what they are.

Hey @Phileosophos. This taken from the User Guide:

Thanks. I saw that in the user guide too, but it doesn’t look to me like it necessarily explains the dark blue versus medium blue versus light blue. At this point, I think I’m going to wait until they have a patch that fixes the basic issue and see how things work then.