Should be greate to have an integration betweenScaler 3 and new Instacomposer 3.
This could improve use of Scaler 3 and production time (reduce time to market) along with Instacomposer 3 that has new characteristics.
Thanks.
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You can just drag and drop your chord progression from Scaler 2/3 into Instacomposer 3. There you will have to acknowledge the chords and the scale in the analyser. It works, but it is not too helpful. As Instacomposer’s songmaker will totally ignore your progression and will just do its own thing.
If you work on every single song section (like intro, chorus, vers, etc) without interference of the songmaker it might produce interesting results. But I am not sure if staying in Scaler 3.X isn’t quicker and inside Scaler 3 you’ll have much more control over the result.
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Thank you for your helpful comments. Your advise sound interesting, I will try it.
As someone failing to get to grips with Scaler 3, I have to see Insta 3 intrigues me, then I’m not really a composer, more a dabbling hobbyist
Same here, Insta’s faster access to altered and slash chords is something I was expecting Scaler 3 to provide but I feel that it very difficult to make substitutions. The circle of 5th page has too much UI clutter to do this efficiently; you cannot even read the full chord name because it’s captured in some rectangular box that truncates the name. I think they now disabled the zoom feature to let you SCALE it so the full name could be read. Very frustrating. Let me right-click and get a menu or something simpler; or rather, just fill that area with text instead of graphics. The small text at the bottom is the only useful part and that’s very small and harder to read. I’d argue it’s redundant and would rather just one or the other. In the example here, they’re all iii chords and E chords. It doesn’t need to be repeated in every case. I’d rather it just shows the degree.
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I see them as two different tools, just like the orchestrators in TOC4 and Opus have -for me- different value to my workflow. I think that both tools are very useful, especially for those who need help with the type of tools found it both. For me its definitely not an either or, but tools that are both useful.
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Instacomposer 3 is new. And everyone is in awe what you can do with it. But then again, what you really do, is choosing the instruments for the midi tracks. Everything else is just pushing a button. I did experiments with my own midi input and it was kind of OK. But I like the control I have with Scaler 3. But I have to admit, I am not as clueless about music theory anymore as I was before I worked some years with Scaler 2. In hindsight, working with Scaler was more a training program than a static tool.
Today I need Scaler much less than at the start of my journey. And I am damn thankful for that. Knowledge and skill make you independent. If I had no access to a PC I still could sit myself at a Piano and make music.
Anyway, I made small video with the help of Instacomposer 3. As I said it was the push of a button. It sounds cool. But I do not feel much about it. Because I did not create it.
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Instacomposer 3 can give “happy accident-phrases” but these cannot compare with the great scaler motions.And - for my ears - Instacomposer 3 gives n o t musically correct results. A chord progression which is sounding pleasant before is sounding strange after being analysed and played through the random generated instacomposer-phrases.These phrases rarely follow the chords and bass correctly.
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Thank you for your comments and clarification. For this reason I would like to ask if in the future Scaler 3.x or another version could have some interesting functionality like Instacomposer 3 (for example, to suggest or give some clues to create melodies, suggest sections of the song structure Instacomposer functionality, etc.) or having an interfase with Instacomposer to use Scaler 3 abilities and superior characteristics that could feed them into Instacomposer 3 to improve final results.
I installed InstaComposer 3, but I do not see a lot of new features. However, there were some improvements in UI:
There is a presentation of the song structure with small tumbnails, where sections can be reset, inserted, copied, pasted, moved or deleted, which I found interesting and very helpful. I would call this “shortcuts”. Maybe this could be an inspiration for Scaler team for how to organize the future scenes in Scaler 3 because the IC3 way is easy and fast. It is easier to go from section to section by clicking on the shortcuts, without the need to scroll a lot.
Please, think about this and maybe implement in one of the future releases. The shortcuts do not need to be big – just to know where something is and where we need to put it or what to do with it. This can be interchanged with the virtual piano (on/off via a radio button or any other way). We do not need to enter the keys while we organize our structure and vice versa, as the name of the page indicates - Arranger. 
There are presentations and choices of scenes (oh, yes, I remember this from IC2, but I forgot as I did not use it a lot, and it’s been a long time ago). Everything else looks as before. I paid 10$ - not a big amount of money (update from IC2), but this should not be called a new version, rather an update, and Scaler is free to update for this kind of improvement.
The biggest problem of IC has always been the fact that it is based on a scale. Select a scale and “the magic will happen”. Not really. What about the people, including myself, who have no idea what chord to use for the solo they have in head. Maybe this exists somewhere in IC3 but is certainly far from being obvious. I’ll check if there is a possibility to import my solo and that IC recognizes the chords and propose scales. Not obvious, as I mentioned.
I don’t like the idea of generating progression e.g. for bass or melody, without listening to it before applying. The good is that it can be dynamically changed, but I think this is completely random. On the other side, I like the idea of tweaking the chords by using controls to change the population or type of chords, but this already exists in Scaler 3. Maybe the IS3 presentation gives an impression of more detailed tweaking, but basically, there is no difference - we have -10 to +10 in both cases.
Anyways, I do not risk using IC3 a lot, if at all. All I need to work - I already have it in Scaler 3. It is not ideal, but is excellent and more intuitive, and is still improving.
The last thing to compare. For my fellow Scalerians who think that font in Scaler 3 is too small – the one in InstaComposer is even smaller. The non contrasted parts of text in both are evenly pale. The problem is that Scaler has more of these pale parts.
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Thank you Miki for your detaled and useful analysis of IC3 and agreed with you with the features that could be included in Scaler 3 from IC3.
Actually, I think it was a major update, the ability to generate a whole song, and the inclusion of styles as well as certain editing on the piano roll are major. I see Scaler and IC3 and different tools for different reasons. If you compose scores both have utility. I wouldn’t be without either and they are both inexpensive. Depends on what your needs are.
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I tried one-click song generation. It works and creates a complete song from the structure defined by IC3 (intro, verse1, pre-chorus, chorus1, verse 2, etc.). However, I did not find settings to define the length of each section. By default, they are 8 bars long. Some sections sounded nice, but a lot of progressions were cacophonic.
Songs are limited to 6 tracks and as I may see, the structure is limited to 18 sections with a maximum length of eight bars each.
There are MIDI Detect and MIDI import, but I could not find detection of audio files or live playing. At least, the User Manual does not mention such an option.
There are several features that I found useful. Besides the shortcuts to go directly and very fast to any section (it takes a fraction of a second), UI scaling works fine. There are pre-defined percentages (90%, 100%, 120%, 140% and 160%) and the results are proportional. The other feature that I appreciated was a dedicated Drum track.
I believe that I will not use IC3 more than a few times, as was the case with IC2. It was just by curiosity and a very low price that I bought it hoping that there was something new and useful for me.
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