Tutorial: How to Import Scaler 2 Chords to the Chord Track in Logic Pro 2 for iPad Quickly

EdZAB

There's a very quick and easy way to get your chord progression from Scaler 2 into Logic Pro 2.0 for iPad. This video demonstrates one way to do it. There may be better and more effective ways to get the job done, so feel free to chime in with any suggestions.

How to Import Scaler 2 Chords to the Chord Track in Logic Pro 2 for iPad Quickly

Pxlhg

Very good suggestion, thanks!

drconfusion

Oh man. This is great. I tried the method that David from the scaler folks used for the desktop with no success, but this method works. Oh heck yeah.

richardyot

Thanks for posting this, I was trying to figure it out myself - I didn't realise you could edit the chords from the inspector, I was using the panel that pops up when you tap a chord, but that doesn't work for this method.

Bonus tip: you can copy chords from the chord track and paste them as MIDI onto any MIDI track!

EdZAB

Here are a some related tips to go with the video that I was either not able to cover or found later:

• if you want to copy more than one individual chord from the chord track to a MIDI track, or elsewhere, you can group the chords together and then paste them. Just do one of the following while in Trim mode from the Tracks area menu bar: (1) Double tap a chord and choose Select All or Select All in Cycle to select the chords or (2) Use multi-select button (the overlapping dashed squares) to select multiple chords (not necessarily adjacent) and turn off multi-select, and then tap one of the chords in the selection and tap "Group Chords." The chords will now be grouped together with whatever lengths they had been set at, but it will group all chords between the first and last selection. You can then copy these to a MIDI track or to another location along the Chord Track (for example if you have a verse that will repeat).
• You can group and ungroup the chords at any time on the Global Chord Track. So, for example, if you've got your global chord track in the order and timing that you want, and had to group them to paste them into another track, you can always ungroup them, edit and then re-group again, or leave them ungrouped.
• Many Apple Loops (both MIDI and Audio) include chord progressions in them and will show chords in the Region Chords when loaded into a track. You can tap on the track, click on Chords in the popup menu, do a "Copy Region Chords" and then paste the chord sequence into the global chords track or elswhere. **Note that you have to be careful if the Loop is in a different key than the project - Logic will re-interpret the chords depending on how they are manipulated - this is simply due to the fact that the same chord can often be given a different label for the same exact notes when working in different keys by convention. This means that if there's a particular chord progression in an Apple Loop that sounds good (and it includes the region chords - not all do), you can steal that progression to use in the session player or just use the chord progression yourself in whatever way you normally would.
• There are many Session Player Loops included and of course you get the region chords automatically with these, and you can copy the region chords out just like stated above, but you can also convert the track from a Session Player to a MIDI or Pattern region. You can do lot of things with the loops in those other formats like feed them into a plugin that will arpeggiate the notes, or manipulate them in some other way, but the really cool part is that the chord progression is built in, so you're really working with chord building blocks, and ones that are already harmonically sequenced, as opposed to having to either record in MIDI notes, or edit them in piano roll. Of course, you can always import your own MIDI tracks and there are plenty out there with progressions built in, but one advantage of using the ones in Logic Pro are that you can copy out the chord progression to another track and have that track follow along by using the Session Players
• The global chord track can function as a chord guide, and you can get the chords into it by using something like Scaler 2, as shown in the video, by manually entering them by selecting the chord type from the menu, or using the MIDI input for chord recognition from either an external MIDI device or possibly another MIDI Fx (I haven't tried anything other than Scaler 2 so far). So, for example, if you imported a MIDI track with a I-IV-V-I progression, or whatever, you could create your own guide track by using the global chord track.

I highly recommend experimenting with the chord tracks feature and seeing what else you can do with it - it really opens an entire new dimension for working in Logic Pro. I don't have Logic Pro 11, but I suspect a lot of these things can be done in a similar way there, and it probably has more flexibility.

cytone

Thanks for the tips here. I didn’t know you could copy and paste the chord progressions to a midi clip, and found the library has a ton of session player loops which are well made.
Also just noticed the keyboard player has a manual mode too so you can program your own rhythm into it - don’t know how I missed that.
This had turned out to be a really great feature update with a lot more depth than I originally thought.

HolyMoses

@cytone said:
Thanks for the tips here. I didn’t know you could copy and paste the chord progressions to a midi clip, and found the library has a ton of session player loops which are well made.
Also just noticed the keyboard player has a manual mode too so you can program your own rhythm into it - don’t know how I missed that.
This had turned out to be a really great feature update with a lot more depth than I originally thought.

Agree!

As an inspiration, these new groundbreaking features in Logic Pro v2/v11 can do magic for our musical minds!!

Wish we could program in our own chord progression to add to Logics only six progressions…

Next up to longing for, a guitarist Session Player…

bluegroove

Thanks for sharing this and the other tips. Having a lot of fun with this already.