Once a chord has been added to section C, I’d like to be able to right-click it and change things about the chord, such as make it a 7th. I really hoped this would be available in v3, as it was requested multiple times years ago and seems like such an obvious facility.
Here’s my user story: I’m working in C minor scale. My first chord is C minor, and for the next chord, experimenting with Scaler’s magic of suggestions, I end up with D minor – not diatonic to my scale, but sounds great. Nice, I like it!
Now though I want to change the chord to D minor 7th, and this appears needlessly difficult. Dmin7 will not show among the 7ths on the Colors page, because it’s non-diatonic. I may be able to find it among the Substitutions, but even if it’s there somewhere, it seems I’m searching blindly and, so far, failing. Instead, I’d like to right-click my D minor chord, choose “7th” and be done with it.
Click on the v9 (Colors) icon in Section B. Choose 7ths and drag it down. The Colors page is also your friend. You can also just click D on the Circle of Fifths. You can extract voicing from another chord and apply anywhere.
There are many many ways to do this really it’s about getting used to the software. It’s a powerful beast so it just takes some time.
@marekjedlinski That’s a great idea! A quick way to add a 7,9 etc would be most welcome.
I personally find the colors page a bit of a faff and sometimes confusing because of the amount of stuff on there. If you wanted to, say, try the 7th, 9th and 13th of the same chord that’s quite a lot of clicking and dragging on the colors page.
If you want to see all the extensions for a particular chord then the circle of fifths tab is better but a right-click menu would be more immediate.
As far as I’m concerned the more ways to get to the end result the better!
I agree with the general feedback mentioned here. It would be great just to click on a chord and quickly be able to edit the extension / tensions.
If I am in the scale of C Major for example, and have a set of simple triad chords on the main track of C / F / G, and I want to add a 7th to the F chord, I should be able to right click → Edit Chord, and switch on / off the different extensions / tensions, similar to Cubase below.
However, Scaler provides me with a list of Suggested Chords which I need to scroll through to find. This takes time, and to make it worse, the actual chord name doesn’t always fit onto the chord button, so you have to hover and let it scroll to see the proper name. This is time consuming and super cumbersome.
It would be far faster to have switches as in Cubase, and I would argue better for learning how chords are put together.
And lastly, while in most cases what I am looking is in the Suggested Chords, it is not always, so you need to manually create your chord with the lower keyboard, and apply your own music theory knowledge, which is defeating one the main purposes of Scaler.
I acknowledge there is the Colors page now, but this doesn’t really allow for a super fast workflow for just changing the extension of a single chord. IMO the Colors page is not conducive to learning, it mixes concepts of chord extensions / tensions, a long with the voicings, which are two fundamentally different concepts.
