Deep-diving into Scaler 3, coming from Scaler 2 it is a massive change of UI and workflow, which means re-learning the whole thing… and facing some frustrations!
Aside from key features missing like the sync between instances, I’m really wondering what’s the expected workflow for Scaler 3…
The new “DAW-style” approach seems kinda crippled for the moment, and the more “single-use” approach is also crippled, whereas it was a bliss in Scaler 2.
I just don’t get it.
What’s the base-case intended use?
In my former use of Scaler 2, I was building a chord progression to find a bed for the track, exporting the MIDI to my DAW and then modifying the articulations to find leads and arpeggios for example, and dragging that MIDI to my DAW. One of the key feature with this approach was the possibility to build very complex structures using different articulations for each bar and program all that in Scaler before export. Downside is that it was a bit destructive (every time I was editing my articulations for a new track, the previous one was gone). Only work-around was saving multiple iterations via presets. No perfect but it worked and I had a lot of flexibility in building complex phrases, testing them on the fly with keyboard binding or synced to DAW.
Scaler 3 offering “multi-track”, I thought it would allow for more flexibility with the same approach and allow me to keep all my articulations for all my track in a single instance and pick & choose to re-use them, re-combine them etc, whilst having freedom to route tracks to external MIDI gear (VST or hardware) if I want to.
But not quite! Reason is that if we consider the main track as a “flat” chord progression without articulation and use the additional tracks to build up variations to send to multiple external tracks via MIDI (no I don’t want to use internal mixer and VST hosting, it’s less convenient for processing and I also use hardware), then we cannot play these articulations using a keyboard with binded chords. It plays the main track only.
We HAVE to press play and play everything to get the additional tracks to send the MIDI, and when we mute other tracks it doesn’t mute MIDI… which means when working on a specific track in solo, we need to mute externally all the others.
It ends up being quite tedious, so much for the multi-track ! It feels like it’s intended to be used like Scaler is the master and plays everything like a DAW, but I don’t necessarily want to build everything in scaler… I might want to sketch ideas, build some articulations combinations, play them on the fly with keyboard binding and from there send it in MIDI to my DAW.
basically all that the edit mode was doing in scaler 2, in a very flexible way. Edit mode is gone (or say made much less user-friendly).
Trying to stick to my former process of focusing on 1 track, then I need to work only with the main track especially because of keyboard binding feature and also prevents me from muting tracks I don’t work on, but here again we’re limited because we cannot build easily complex articulations in the main track and swap between different versions. We are limited to 1 articulation (the one available at the bottom left of the browse page). We cannot mix & match various articulations for each bar like we do for additional track.
Even the sketch menu doesn’t help much because it’s mixed with the main articulation so when we “send to sketch” the main track with its articulation, the articulation isn’t brought into the sketch. Instead, it plays the articulation selected for that line in the sketch AND the main one if it’s still activated… quite a mess, so need to deactivate the main articulation. And sketch cannot be edited anyway, we can just pick one articulation and that’s it (ok it’s a sketch but hey..).
So sketch cannot provide me with the flexibility to test different versions of articulations combinations on various bars neither 
So if I want to build some fancy combinations of articulations, the only way is using the additional motion tracks, which loops back to the issues mentioned above.
I don’t know if it’s me being picky but my use case seems simple and was covered in V2.
And if I push the thing to an extreme stupid use of Scaler 3 and decide to ditch completely all the multi-tracking options and decide to go for 1 instance of Scaler for each of my MIDI tracks using presets to pass-on my chords progression from one instance to the other (until sync instances comes back…?) to fit my need, then the main track and the additionnal articulated tracks play together. We need to isolate them using different MIDI channels because the mute doesn’t mute MIDI. Selecting “none” MIDI channel for the main track kills my keyboard from reaching the VST so not an option, so I need to set a MIDI channel for my VST and select the corresponding channel in Scaler 3 different than the main track, then the VST plays the articulated track OK, but it plays the main track when i use the keyboard… Even using host feature doesn’t solve that workflow issue.
So after spending hours testing this new version, reading the manual and trying to figure out how I should use Scaler 3, I end up with no decent workflow and just feel pretty frustrated.
And cherry on the cake, the plugin crashed (once).
So what am I missing here? I must have missed something, I can’t believe scaler 3 would not offer at least as much as V2 did, right?
