I’ve been working with Scaler 3 and I love the product and have put together some nice progressions. However, I sometimes feel like I’m mostly relying on trial and error rather than a structured workflow. The general documentation is helpful, but it doesn’t go into much depth on Scaler’s advanced tools. I’d love to hear from other users about how you approach composing using Scaler 3.
For Example:
Do you build on what you play, or do you usually pick a scale first?
How do you leverage the Suggest dialog and associated options? It seems kind of hit or miss for me right now.
Do you have a set workflow for building complete songs or do you move off of Scaler into another software package (i.e. DAW, EZ Keys, etc.) to complete the composition?
I am probably over thinking the whole process, but I am trying to move beyond random exploration and learn from how other use Scaler 3 as a composition tool. Any favorite tips, tricks, workflows you can share would be greatly appreciated or you can tell me to stop thinking so much and just create .
FYI – I do have fair knowledge of music theory if that helps….
The easy way is starting a song from scratch. Browse the long list of scales and click on one that takes my fancy. The chords it throws up are then bound to the keyboard and I noodle around to find a progression I like.
I might dip into the various performances to get a feel for what stuff could sound like then I almost always drag those chords and maybe some performances into my DAW to take it further. Sometimes I use the inversions and voicings to get some variety but, tbh, once I have it in the DAW piano roll it’s just as easy to play with voicings there - just duplicate notes and move some of them up or down an octave and swap some pairs of notes, particularly at the end of bars.
The second way is when I have a melody or part of a song that I want to take further. Scaler is brilliant at listening to melody lines and giving a list of matching or partially matching scales. Then I proceed as described above. I rarely venture into the artist progressions, because they seem very hit and miss to me, and I’ve never found the suggestion thing to be very useful.
I barely go near the create page (the middle one) . It never seems to improve anything for me. The Neo-Riemannian tab reminds of those modern classical pieces that challenge the musicians and also challenge the listener by sounding “a bit wrong”. I have no use for that stuff but I’m sure others do. To me the best songs have only a few chords, and not very complex chords at that.
I’ll probably use the arrange page more when it gets better, thus delaying the point at which I move into my DAW. At present the hoops you have to jump through to get more than one motion type on the same track are a real turn off. Whoever designed that has never made a “normal” track where you typically want something different in the 4th bar.
So I’m not finding Scaler 3 much of an improvement on Scaler 2 just now. But I’m sure they will improve it. Scaler 2 evolved a huge amount during its lifetime and Davide is great at listening to users and guiding the development.
I’ve probably rambled enough. My summary is that Scaler features early in my process then everything else happens in the DAW - Studio One in my case.
I use it the same way I used Scaler 2 in that I find chords, or detect chords and look for variations and then I lock in my chord progression. Scaler 3 does a few more things in that I tend to hang around in it longer - whereas with Scaler 2 I always left it 25-50% through song creation. In Scaler 3 I tend to do these extra things:
Use Colors page and Explore page to vary my chords and expand them / the chord progression and take advantage of Section C being as long as I want it (to try new chords, progressions etc).
I use a few Scaler instances so I have a mix of:
Triggering chord and global motions via BIND with DAW Sync Off
Using the Arrange Page to try inversions and multipliers for Bass, Chord Follow, Motion tracks (mainly looping around my progression whilst in DAW Sync)
Dragging the MIDI of some of my child tracks elsewhere (Bassline to a monophonic instrument, Chords to EZ Keys, MIDI to Kontakt etc etc)
So I have more complexity and it takes some more thinking, but I have expanded my composition ability greatly.
As we move forward we are finding and learning new things, user preferences, things that do and don’t work so well and we are addressing them head on to make sure this tool becomes loved for time. I think 3.2 will make it all much more obvious plus some more videos inbound too of me using it in some commercial releases!
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