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OK I’m and idiot. Why custom scales?
Hello all you beautiful people…. So in many threads and videos (@gavinski) is always bitchen 😂. I’m an old dumb guitar player, so what do you all mean when you say your wish xyz had custom scales or the ability to save your own? What are you doing that the many many scales that are available that would require you to do this?
Rez
Comments
You know how on guitar you can play any scales you want based on your musical knowledge and technique experience? Is a good feeling isn't it
More seriously I'd say that as note choice is one of the primary means of personal expression through the legacy of the European notated music tradition, and every individual has their own
nuanced and personalised ways of expressing themselves through their note choices, that allowing custom scales is one of the greatest enhancements to personal expression that can be added to a composition tool.
What’s the point of scales? There’s the chromatic scale, isn’t that enough?
I personally never use scales in apps because 20 years of obsessing over music theory and experimentation is how I filter my note choices, but every human is individual and how they interact with their tools is unique to them alone, so we've got to keep our minds open to expression through any methodology.
@u0421793 I also am assuming you're playing devils advocate, so I'm playing the devils advocate's devilish advocate here
yeah, but......
why "Root Note" ?????!!!?!!?
Lately I've been using Tonality to check what scale and the notes I play fit into to...
...it makes it a lot easier create chord pads that match what I play.
(I consider Tonality to be a 'must have' app to be totally honest).
I also find playing a 'grid'(LPPro3) to be far more enjoyable than playing traditional keyboard, just like some prefer string or wind-instruments or even percussion over keys.
Even though the LPPro3 has scales support and option to hide out-of scale notes I usually leave them on.
I'd say instead of calling it 'custom scales' call it 'hide the notes/keys I don't need at the moment'
Wow. Eloquently said. 👏
Custom scales have many uses, but one is exactly for those people who have little music theory. Let's say you come up with a nice little melody containing only 4 or 5 notes. And you want some midi generator like chordjam to randomly generate just chords using those notes for you, or arpeggiate chords based just on those notes, with custom scale ability you can do that. Xynthesizr has a nice implementation of this. You just enter the notes you want and it will generate midi containing only those notes. You don't need to know a thing about music theory, you don't need to know the names of the possible scales those notes fit into, you don't need to have the risk of extra notes being generated other than the exact notes you want, etc etc....
Oh no, that implies dualism, and I don’t know which side of that fence I’m on
I do love your posts - they're often hilarious. I keep meaning to say this every time you drop one of these gems, so I've finally said it.
+1
+1
@onerez : what @Gavinski said: speaking personally, as a musical ignoramus, there is no way I’m not going to introduce bum out of scale notes into my mindless noodling without the training wheels option of a ‘lock to scale’ mode.
I picked Aolian in D as my go-to scale, because I like the way it sounds, and because it wasn’t C Major (!) and will generally lock all the apps I have which offer it as an option to that while I’m noodling around with auto generators. That way, whatever gets generated will work with anything else I have got saved from other sessions.
I also used the ‘custom scale’ option in KB-1 to create a user keyboard in D Aolian too, and this means I can jam live around on top of whatever other apps I have running, and capture the result in Atom 2, knowing it is literally impossible for me to play a bum note. Doesn’t mean I’ll be playing a good note, but hey... it’s a start. I find this absolutely essential. Same trick in Animoog, and with the Animoog keyboard in Model 15.
I reckon a semi-chromatic scale that I think would guide people into cool sounds without total restriction would be a 'composite minor' -- basically a chromatic scale with the b2, 3 and b5 omitted.
As an aside, I’m going through some of the songs I made in Gadget a couple of years ago, and I now realise that among other things that Gadget can be blamed for (ie it makes you make insanely complex compositions that basically require a lot of yak-shaving down later) it encouraged and enticed me to use all those fancy scales and keys and modes. I thought, why not, I can pretend I know what these are by making a song in them.
Now I’m remaking those songs in LPX with hardware synths (including the absolutely superb Behringer Cat - everyone should have one) I see that LPX up front offers two ways of being - major, or minor.
What’s that film – What wines have you got? Er well, we’ve got red, …and white. Some Simon Pegg film I think.
So now I’m thinking it would have made my work a lot easier if I’d have just stuck with those, and it’d probably be more acceptable to the public, too, as they’ve heard those before.
+1
OK. Why are clothes "off the rack" ever altered to fit someone?
Why don't we just operate early in life and make all buyers fit international fashion standards?
This catering to the whim of the individual must stop.
Choice is over-rated and often confusing for most consumers.
Which new iPad is the perfect one for me? Too many choices.
Incidentally, does anyone know of any substantial (ie, with usable results) studies on the correlation between colour palettes and musical scales or keys, preferably without mentioning the whole distraction of synaesthesia (because this would make it an unusable theory to generalise out in the hope of applying it to most people).
Well said @OscarSouth.
When I'm using an app that has no custom scales support but I have the "right" tones in my ear, I'm really missing a way to enter them quickly, like on a 1-octave keyboard.
When I get a list of scale names presented, this is a "wtf" experience for someone like me who composes by ear.
Not that I couldn't use the chromatic scale anyway but if other scales are supported, they shouldn't impose limits to the composer.
Exactly this and this. But 35 years of that same obsessing.
I was actually confused when everyone in the Atom 2 is released thread were all talking about how awesome the “scales” part was. I thought “why would anyone need that when there’s a full chromatic keyboard and a piano roll right in front of them?
Then I started playing with them and the various options that go with, like “omit wrong notes” and then using a non traditional controller like my Launchpad Pro Mk3, and found it quite amazing to be able to quickly experiment with different scales, and scales that I normally wouldn’t try together. I also found it especially helpful to have the chosen scales highlighted on the piano roll, for when you’re manually adding notes. And that’s just it, the “methodology” but also, because we can with MIDI and technology making it possible.
That’s 35 years obsessing over music theory and experimentation from a fretboard’s perspective, not a piano keyboard… so I’m warming up to these “scales features” in apps now!
Most of everything you know on guitar transcribes easy enough on a chromatic piano keyboard, but having certain scales singled out does come in handy for those where the keys aren’t their primary instrument.
There was another reason I discovered why I like having them… but I forgot what it was 🧐
Gotta give scales some flavor
I’m with everyone who just learns scales - I mostly play piano so it’s been a huge benefit to learn all kinds of scales in different keys to the point where I can guess where notes should be before I play them.
I’d recommend learning and practicing scales to anyone, including any that fall outside of the more commonly used ones.
Imma D-Dorian and E-Phrygian guy for the same two reasons, but also because them two only use white keys.
Guitar is easier in that respect because you just move any scale patterns you know up or down the fretboard and they stay the same. If I could just train my dumb fingers not to always play pentatonic and blues scales on that damn guitar I'd be awesome.
All them black keys mess with my head on keyboard, so if I need other scales than those two I usually have to retreat to custom scales.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned micro-tonal scales. I'm waiting until someone drops in to tell us we're not real musicians until we compose in some of them. We haven't had a good row about that around here for a long time.
I like to program subsets of scales in the Animoog keyboard. This — or any other diatonic layout — results in effects that would be impossible to play on a chromatic kb.
custom scales don't have to be limited to 12 tone equal temperament either. I like custom scales for the fact that I can use entirely different tuning systems. 12 tone's fine for some things, but not suited for all music.
I only wish that more ios apps supported alternate tunings. There are some good ones, but I wish more people cared enough to push developers to implement tuning support.
hoping this gets a port for ios
https://oddsound.com/index.php
I picked D Dorian for pretty much the same reason - I just like how the sad-but-hopeful mode sounds. Nothing whatsoever to do with it being all the white notes on a keyboard
You are not a real musician until you wrote a song in Z flat dominant major seventh.
And neither am I because I don't know any scales.
Let me put in my bit to try to fill that void then
12 tone Chromatics requires mastery over the permutation and combinations of note combination. Having scale options give us access to the theory without the years of practise to for our hands to catch up to our mind.
Perhaps it's true that one hasn't truly explored the breadth of tonal landscape until one has opened their mind to microtones. But just as getting a handle on spicy chords on the piano requires a kind of dedicated virtuosity, so do the nuanced melodies on the oud.
Music software has given us hope though, is what I'm getting at. Synths and FXs and layering has giving us access to sounds the likes of Mahler could only dream of. Hip modulations a couple taps away in your lofi beat. Generative meditations reminiscent of a Indian Raga, but with motifs straight out of Wagner. There's still hope for an epic midi chord pack within the Persian intonation as it's originally intended, so we can collectively moan about the days gone where there's art and subtlety in our wooden tuning pegs on the sitar slowly sliding out of tune.
@Cyndilov : microtonal midi pack? I got you! Oh, wait...