Scaler Music Scaler 3

Scaler has evolved into a fully‑fledged compositional toolkit.

If your compositional process often starts with chords, and you are open to the concept of a software‑based writing assistant, then Scaler may well be a product you are familiar with. However, five years after Scaler 2 was released, Scaler Music have now released Scaler 3 and, without wishing to issue a spoiler alert, I do think it’s been worth the wait. So, what’s new in Scaler 3?

The Scale Of The Project

From a practical perspective, Scaler operates as both a standalone application and as a plug‑in. At its heart, Scaler — in both its v1 and v2 iterations (see the December 2018 and September 2020 reviews) — is perhaps best thought of as a chord sequence explorer, allowing you to experiment with chord choices, guiding you on chord selection, suggesting chord alternatives/substitutions (including more harmonically complex choices), chord voicings, and letting you venture into chords that might lie outside your chosen key/scale. Those chord sequences could be easily auditioned and, when you settled on a chord sequence you thought was promising, MIDI could be dragged and dropped to your DAW for further work.

Scaler 3 is still all of the above. However, there are two very significant changes. First, an impressive redesign of the UI organises all this core ‘creating chord progressions’ functionality in a much clearer fashion. Second, and just as impressive, Scaler 3 now goes way beyond chord sequence exploration and into the realms of ‘compositional tool meets MIDI sequencer’.

Three For Three

In terms of the UI, Scaler 3’s functionality is now arranged across three main pages — Browse, Create and Arrange — accessed via the tab buttons located top left. The Browse page, which itself is divided into three sections, will be familiar to longstanding Scaler users. The Chord Set and Current Scale panels provide alternative ways to kickstart your chord selections, and provide a very impressive collection of genre/mood/artist chord sets that could keep your songwriting inspired for a considerable time. Chords from these panels can then be dropped into the Main Track panel to build your own chord sequence. Auditioning chords within each panel is made easy as each features a ‘bind’ button letting you link that panel to your MIDI keyboard and mapping each full chord to a single key for instant triggering.

Switching to the Create page keeps the Current Scale and Main Track options visible but the central body of the UI then provides five sub‑panels offering alternative chord exploration approaches. Circle of Fifths gives you an interactive way of exploring that music theory concept to find chords that work together, while Modulation provides a very clever toolset to explore modulation pathways between your Main Track chord sequence and a target destination scale. If your Music Theory 101 grade was a bit shaky, this is a brilliant environment to explore some sophisticated key/scale changes within your compositions.

The Create page is home to a whole suite of sophisticated tools for further chord exploration, including the Sketch panel.

The Explore panel offers a further circular chord finding environment, but this time the chord selections are based upon genre (for example, ambient, synthwave, cinematic and many others) and mood (bright, dark and neutral). The arrangement and colour coding of the chord display provides a helpful steer, letting you pick chords that are either harmonically similar or contrasting, or ‘lighter’ or ‘darker’ in sound. The Colors panel provides multiple lanes of alternative chords to those within your current scale, letting you pick from either harmonically different options or chord inversions.

Finally, the Sketch panel provides a sketchpad‑style environment letting you build up to seven alternative chord sequences. You can drag and drop chords from the Current Scale or Main Track selections, audition the sequences, and bind your MIDI keyboard to a particular sequence for easy chord triggering. Playback uses the sound selected for the Main Track but, for each lane, you can select a different Motion. Motions are, essentially, short performance phrases/styles that adapt to the currently selected chord or chord sequence. I’ll come back to these in a minute, but Scaler 3 includes a huge selection of such Motions, spanning rhythmic chords, standard arpeggios, ostinatos, various expressions and styles suitable for melodic or bass performances. Used here, they let you audition your chord sequences in a more realistic ‘performance’ style. The other element of note (and it appears elsewhere within the Scaler UI) is the ‘lightbulb’ icon that appears within the various chord lanes. Click on one of these and Scaler will automatically generate a chord sequence for you (or complete an existing one). No, you won’t perhaps love every option it creates but it’s a useful writing assistant to have handy when your inspiration needs a kickstart.

Scaler Feng Shui

It’s Scaler’s new Arrange page — which represents a very ambitious upgrade to concepts previously found in the Perform panel — that is home to that second leap forward I mentioned earlier. With the Main Track chord sequence providing the timeline along the top, you can now add further instrument tracks beneath this in a DAW‑like fashion, and whatever MIDI content is placed on these tracks (more on this in a minute), it will follow the chords (and adapt to changes in those chords) on the Main Track.

The new Arrange page allows you to transform chord sequences into multitrack performances.

Each of these additional tracks can use its own sound and Motion. In terms of sounds, these can either be one of Scaler 3’s expanded collection of internal sounds or, rather wonderfully, any third‑party VST or AU virtual instruments you have installed. Oh, and for added fun, the Mixer now provides three VST/AU effects slots per instrument track and on the Master Output channel. MIDI playback data for these tracks can be added via the huge collection of Motions mentioned earlier and, if you divide the MIDI regions up within a single track, you can add a different Motion (performance pattern/style) to each MIDI region. And, once you have set up any Motion on a track, you can fine tune its performance style with a combination of options (Octave, Inversion, Transpose, Density, Voicing, etc), all located on the left‑hand edge of the lower half of the screen. Open the MIDI Editor sub‑panel and you can see exactly what’s happening as you make changes. Incidentally, you can make manual changes to notes but, if you do that, notes within that clip appear in red to indicate that, for that clip at least, you have broken the link between the clip and the Main Track chords. A Re‑attach button lets you re‑establish that link if required.

Even in this first iteration, the potential of the Arrange page concept is very obvious. You can now go a long way beyond just creating your song’s chord progression and well into the territory of its musical arrangement. And, when you are ready, all the MIDI can be exported into your DAW for further work. It’s impressive stuff.

Scaling Great Heights?

It’s not possible to cover all of Scaler 3’s extensive ‘new and improved’ list here, but I’ll close by mentioning a couple of other personal highlights located within the Keyboard display controls at the base of the UI. First, the Voice Grouping setting provides all sorts of interesting options that can control note selections as you transition between chords, allowing you to make chord changes seem smoother (or not, as required).

From a music theory perspective, this is pretty sophisticated stuff; it’s brilliant, inspiring and, occasionally, harmonically well above my musical paygrade, but fascinating to use.

Second, amongst other options, when you bind your MIDI keyboard to the Chord Set, Current Scale or the Main Track chords, and activate the Key Lock feature in Chord Scales mode, this lets you trigger your Chord Set from the black keys, while automatically adjusting the note mapping to the white keys — upon which you can play a melodic line — to follow the scale of the currently triggered chord. From a theory perspective this occasionally went well above my musical paygrade, but it’s fascinating to use.

Oh, and just as we were going to press, Scaler Music dropped Scaler 3.2, which, alongside a host of other improvements, adds a very impressive ‘Scenes’ capability. Scenes can contain chord ‘clips’ (sequences) and motions and can then be used to build out your song’s structure along Scaler’s own timeline. It further enhances Scaler’s ability as a song arrangement tool.

The bottom line here is that Scaler 3 is a bit of a triumph. There is new functionality throughout but, because some very careful thought has obviously gone into the design and organisation of the UI, it also provides a much more logical and coherent workflow through that functionality. Finally, it’s worth noting that while there is instant gratification to be had via the preset collection of Chord Sets and Templates, Scaler 3 has considerable depth. Don’t expect to fully master it in a single sitting but, spend some time with it, and you will gradually uncover some of the gems it has to offer.

If you use and love Scaler 2, the upgrade is compelling. If you want a music theory expert to assist with your compositional and songwriting ideas — with the new Arrange page giving you some virtual performer elements to help you realise that idea in a very musical form — then Scaler 3 provides a heck of a toolkit. Highly recommended.