@davide @Tristan Scaler 3.3’s Scale Notes Keys Lock is a massive improvement for me… thank you for that… but it could be better! Here are 3 feature requests and a bug (?) to improve this mode:
1/
when using black keys to play chords while doing an improv with right hand, there is one major problem. The right hand’s sounded notes will be determined by the current left hand chord, and If you are attempting to play both simultaneously, you have only a 50% chance that you’ll hear the right sound due to the 50% chance that you’ll press the white key a fraction of a second sooner… and it will play a sound that’s in the previous chord instead. This unwanted behaviour encourages the person jamming to start playing in a cautious, predictable manner, chord first, then a few improv notes, then chord again followed by some improv notes… which gets very boring very quickly. To overcome this, there are two ideas… The first idea is MUCH easier to implement.
1a/ IF you are jamming to playback of a chord progression while you jam with the right hand, the fix is easy… As the software “knows” what chord it will be playing next, the software can “feed” the next chord progression information to the white keys 0.1 seconds ahead of time. This means that if you happen to press a white key a fraction before the next chord plays, the intended sound will occur. 1/10th sec should be enough, any slower could get in the way of someone intending a note just before the chord change. .
1b/ if you’re jamming with the black keys AND the white keys, this is MUCH more difficult to fix because the software does not know what your next chord is going to be ahead of time!! So there is no easy or elegant fix and these suggestions are not really feasible, but are ideas…. A delay could fix the problem but would be horrid to jam with. Another idea is for Scaler to automatically create a corrected note… so if you hit a white note 1/10th sec before the chord change, that mistimed note will occur but Scaler will know that it was a mistake as soon as the next chord is struck shortly afterwards, and will automatically create another note, this time in harmony with the new chord. This “could” work, but you’d have to go back and do a lot of tidying up afterwards as the DAW you’re recording to will have both the initial bum note and the corrected new one Scaler created automatically.
2/
The second thing is that quite often when using the keys lock in Chord Scales mode, the right hand notes you play will can be in dischord with the chord being played, for example, if you press the D key, it is often as it is one note from root… so the idea is to be able to customise which notes will sound and which notes will be “bumped” to the next OK sounding note. This could be applied to other notes, and include certain others… basically to be able to map which of the notes in the scale (in relation to the root) would be sounded and which would be altered in the same sort of way that the Chord Notes be - so a sort of “customisable Chord Notes”.
3/
voice Grouping for jamming! When you have a chord progression, even if you have chosen to have Voice Grouping on for those chords, when jamming, the notes do not reliably get higher and higher as you move from L to R across the keyboard. This is because the different chords, despite being Voice Grouped, will contain different set of notes. The feature request is for the white notes to keep playing higher and higher, so it would play the next higher note in the new chord that is higher than the note you just played.
BUG-
keys lock chord scales mode - when you press the black keys, they play chords, and if you press the C key higher up, it will play the root note of each of those chords, as expected… this works perfectly except that sometimes the last key sometimes does not play the expected note!
For example, in the chord progression: c-maj d-min e-min f-maj g-maj a-min b-dim
Pressing the C key works perfectly except with the b-dim - when pressing the b-dim chord, the C note plays the same note as it played with the previous A-min chord… see video: