I downloaded and installed Scaler 3 last night and played with it for an hour or two. I did not read the manual, or look at videos, other than all of the previews that were posted here.
I did have some issues that I feel would improve the user interface, and that were unclear. I should add that I am a software developer for over 30 years and have dealt with clients and user interfaces.
There should be a pause and a stop button on the toolbar, or at the very least, the play button icon should change to pause when Scaler is playing. It is not intuitive to click the play button to stop the music from playing. I did find that the space bar works but only tried that because other programs use that also. A pause button would stop where the play indicator is currently, and a stop button would rewind to the beginning.
There are multiple problems with the Main Track. The chord rectangle icons have a double headed arrow on both ends when the cursor is floated over the border. This implies that they are expandable, which is VERY nice, but it ONLY works if there is an empty space before the chord. I deleted the first chord, and was able to make the second chord take the space of both chords. This is great, but when there is no space, there is no way to use the handles to expand to the right, and if you try it at the end of the main track with a number of chords having been selected, it goes crazy, zooming to the right many measures with the slightest touch. I would expect that the handles would move everything to the right if dragged, and as many measures as needed would be created. Either that or dragging an icon in the middle to the right would open up measures. If I delete a chord, I can drag the previous chord wider into the space that is opened, but when I have already created a set of chord changes, that is not only inconvenient, but counterproductive.
There should be tooltips on every control so one does not have to read the manual to figure out what they do.
The project save button should not be hidden. I just happened to find it when moving the mouse around the toolbar area.
Thanks for the hard work creating this new version. I look forward to becoming more familiar with it. My goal was to create ambient chord changes, and that was pretty straightforward.
I should mention that this was all in the standalone version.
For #3. Open the hamburger menu in the top right (three stacked lines). Settings should open. Under Preferences you should find Show Tooltips. Switch that on, it really helps
I did start looking at the manual and found the tool top toggle, so scratch that one. Although the tooltip for the play button does not say anything about stopping playback, either when it is playing or not.
I agree a stop button would be nice. Play doubles as pause, which still requires the additional rewind button click to reset the play head to the beginning. The DAW sync right click option on the play button was sneaky, almost missed that!
The scale list is unwieldy. I tried for a long time scrolling up and down trying to find C minor and never did find it. Perhaps it wasn’t related to the sequence I had chosen, but there were so many scales that I was going blind trying to find it. A search would be very helpful. Filters would be even more helpful.
The problem with dragging to the right only occurs if all of the visible chord measures are full. When you drag to the right it zooms right without stopping.
I did see in the video that if you select chords, you can drag them to the right and open a space. However, it is somewhat difficult to select just the chords you want if they are scrolled off the screen.
Just started poking around - lots to learn! Some quick observations:
There is no visible indication that (when you right click on Play button) you are in DAW sync. Shouldn’t it be like Scaler 2?
Standard Windows/Mac commands should work on chords (and other places as appropriate), such as DEL (delete chord) CTRL+drag to copy a chord to another spot on Main track, CTRL_C to copy a chord to clipboard, etc.
The GUI should be resizable both vertically and horizontally, not just proportionally. I have a 55" main monitor and (2) 48" monitors in landscape mode. It would be GREAT if I could utilize that screen space to show more of the interface vertically!
and thank you! You have done a good job.
Here are my first impressions and my input on what I’ve noticed to improve.
I was looking forward to S3 and was a bit worried that it would be overloaded. This is not the case. I think the process of composition from start to finish is mapped out very well and intuitively. And you can also try things out along the way. That’s the whole point for me.
Anyone who has already used Scaler will find their way around immediately and will be pleased that they can now stay in the project from start to finish. Anyone who knows other apps will recognise them in Scaler. I think that a good job has been done for my needs. It’s also the first time that scanning the VST in my setting has ever worked without any problems. Top!
Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement. For me, the standalone version is the first port of call. Scaler has more than I need, which, as I said, doesn’t bother me due to the skilful process, because I can only keep an eye on the most important things. What I did notice were minor glitches in the process because you have to click a lot. Everyone works differently, but maybe I’m not alone with my concerns.
The first thing I noticed is that you can’t expand the scaler window to cover the entire screen. Also, the proportions in the design are not yet ideal, you could save some height in the tables. Unfortunately, the ‘Save project’ button hasn’t made it to a more prominent position either. And you can’t delete the chords with the return key. Otherwise, the browse page is useful.
On the Create page in the Sketch section, S3 crashes if you want to go beyond 8 chords. Here it should simply not allow the action instead of crashing. Or allow more than 8 chords.
As far as the different modulations are concerned, I actually only ever use the Secondary Scale and the Neo-Riemannian. Nevertheless, I think it would be good if the modulations were dealt with in more detail in the manual in general or if an instructional video were used to demonstrate the potential using a practical project.
The Arrange page now gets down to the nitty-gritty. This is not yet ideal. It requires a lot of unnecessary mouse clicks. It is still too cumbersome. Important shortcuts are also missing. And especially the possibility to enlarge the grids for fine work, i.e. to drag them in width. I also have the habit of start playing with the space bar and would be happy if it started from a specific marker when I press it again, even if it is outside the loop.
For me, the main track is particularly important. But what is really missing is the option for song structure. The option to group chords together, e.g. into intros or verses etc. and thus structure the song internally. I had previously done this via the sketch, now there would finally be the possibility to do this from the main track, where you can now send the individual chords to the „progressions“ whatever you name them. If you now could label the song structure at the end, that would be ideal.
The rest is not so important for me, just a little bit, as I have only worked roughly with different chords follow so far, but if you need the MIDI editor, it is helpful if you can draw and delete notes with just a few clicks and the window can be dragged in width to work in more detail. And octaves, inversions etc. should be assigned shortcuts. These are the things that are really important at the design stage. Now that the various Motions are more easily accessible, I will certainly be trying them out more often to get an impression of the finished song within Scaler. Why a change in a bar immediately colours the entire track red is not clear to me. Ideally, it would only show the changed bars.
Last but not least, I noticed that the routing in Ableton doesn’t work. This would be extremely important to fix.
Maybe there is something there and I haven’t found it yet. But then it wouldn’t be intuitive.
A big wish on my part would be to create a possibility, logically before the chord set in the browser page, where you can insert a MIDI track under which you can then place the chords. I’m thinking here of melodies that are followed by a recommendation for the key and you can then insert the chords at the appropriate places directly underneath. This is an approach that I very often need in practice. Just as an aside.
Incidentally, you can solve any other problem with a good Neapolitan pizza.
Full agreement! The text box should be a clickable drop-down menu with selectable scales - and when selected, only the modes associated with this scale are displayed in the window below. The endless scrolling through all the scales and modes is absolutely annoying, especially as the modes are not sorted alphabetically.
The drop-down menu should probably also be implemented, at least that’s what the tooltip suggests. And I intuitively clicked on it the first time I tried it out - but surprisingly it didn’t work
Couldn’t agree more. This will take some time but aiming for ‘Scenes’ In 3.2 toward June where you can group a series of chords and MIDI clips into a ‘Scene’ and edit and copy those scenes freely.
Unfortunately that Is an Ableton Issue. Ableton does not support Multi-Channel MIDI Out. There are workaround posted here using MAX 4 Live Devices but we are introducing Main Track Live Sync in April to help our Ableton users.
Thank you for your reply, Davide. That really does help me. But I hadn’t actually (intuitively) recognized the connection between section A and section B before. I’m not looking for progressions or moods and I’m not looking for chords by existing notes, so I’ve ignored section A so far and dragged section B all the way to the top so that section A is hidden. And that’s where a drop-down menu in the top bar of section B (or A) would be helpful.
I’m slowly beginning to understand the operating logic behind Scaler 3. However, some steps in the operation are unfortunately not intuitive - and also contradictory. But I will work my way through it.
