I’m trying to find more efficient ways to work on Scaler 3 both on iPad and PC. One of the areas that I’m finding some difficulties is with editing chords while working in the Arrange page. I’ll describe it briefly(?) here, but please let me know if a video demo with a voiceover would be more helpful.
Example: Editing chords in Arrange page
- Working on project a fairly long arrangement, say 20 bars or more, with a lot of small chords, multiple per bar. I want to edit one of the chords near the end, or I want to add a chord at the end, or edit and exiting chord.
- Click to edit chord on a chord close to the end in the Arrange page. The screen jumps to the Browse page and to the Main Track in section C. In many cases, the chord being edited is not in view on the Main Track, and I have to scroll carefully over to the correct bar to find the chord in edit mode, and that leads to further difficulties. On the PC, there’s a scrollbar that can resize the chords in the C section, but on iPad, I don’t see that option, and the chords are very small, too small to see any names. Scrolling and zooming on the PC is possible, but I seem to be unable to get the chord sized large enough to see the name and have a place to drop a new chord without it scrolling out of view.
- To change the chord, the best options appear to be on of the following:
- Select a new chord from the page and Replace at current playhead position.
- Drag a new chord into the same position and insert it in front of the chord being edited.
- Dragging and dropping a chord within the Arrange page is possible, but generally not suitable unless the new chord is nearby on the Arrange page.
- None of these seem very suitable since the playhead may not be at the position of the chord being edited. On the iPad it’s worse because tapping on the new chord to replace it unhighlights the chord being edited in Section C, and without seeing the names, I lose my place.
- When a new chord is added to the position it defaults to a full bar length, so if the bar has 3-4 chords, they all get bumped over and the new chord has to be carefully resized, then all of the chords to the right must be moved over to close the new gap. On PC there is an option to Remove Empty Spaces to pull the chords in. On iPad with version 3.3, I don’t see another way than to drag on the screen to highlight all chords to the end (there could be a lot!) and dragging them all to the exact space to fill the gap. I’ve tried using Select Multiple, and this will provide the option to remove empty spaces but only between chords that have been selected, so again, it would require selecting from the editing position to bar 20 or 70 or wherever the end is, which could be very tricky.
- It would be wonderfully easier if there was an option to either edit a chord in place via a popup window, or to find a chord anywhere in any page, copy it to a buffer and then be able to replace the existing chord in its current location with the same exact length.
There’s more to this, but I’ll stop there and see if I’ve missed something in how I’m handing this chord editing example, then continue to the next editing challenge.
I’m really scratching my head on this one. I’ve been using Scaler 3 since it first came out on PC and on iPad (and Scaler 2 before that), and I don’t recall running into this difficulty before.
Thanks,
Ed