Global Key & Scale

[diminished]

Okay, well I came up with this in another thread. The concept is quite simple. Would you like to have something like that in Reason? Like Blocks, but for Key & Scale. Here's my sales pitch:


Imagine you could compose like that - global Key & Scales.

Wanna lay down a bassline? Cool, you'll automatically stay in key. Change the harmonic structure of the song? Move the blocks where you want! Change individual bars or blocks to another key? All instruments will follow!

ScaleBlocks.jpg (62.71 KiB) Viewed 852 times

[boingy]

I would love to have something like that, along with much more chord and note awareness in the sequencer. I usually have a midi track full of empty clips labelled with the chord names! The piano roll should (optionally) show the note names on the notes and also be able to display the current chord and highlight any notes that are not in the set scale. These are all pretty basic things that would help hugely in tweaking basslines and melodies.

[diminished]

The piano roll should (optionally) show the note names on the notes and also be able to display the current chord and highlight any notes that are not in the set scale.

Very nice! There could also be "next chord suggestions" for people who have no clue whatsoever.

Oh man Global Key & Scale would be sooo cool. My biggest hurdle, structure over time, would suddenly be the easiest part. How many times have I moaned when I had a change of heart regarding the last chord in the pre-chorus and had to change 10 MIDI lanes from one key to another..

[diminished]

Bump, just because I'd like to hear more opinions and spread the idea.

[Loque]

Something like the song should follow defined key-scales was already discussed here and there and i think the idea is good. But my music knowledge is too bad to get a full understanding how this really helps and i see a problem in the form, that every song sounds the same in the end. In that case i need to change notes, maybe outside of the key-scale and there is my key scale already gone. Not sure, how this could be implemented in a usefull way...

[Timmy Crowne]

I think this is a great idea, especially if it could include Player integration. Each player stack could have a switch on top that would toggle between receiving its MIDI data from its own track (as it is now), or receiving notes from the Global Track. Very quickly we could change the chords in the Global Track and the whole arrangement would be instantly changed to the appropriate harmony.

[Re8et]

I think this is a great idea, especially if it could include Player integration. Each player stack could have a switch on top that would toggle between receiving its MIDI data from its own track (as it is now), or receiving notes from the Global Track. Very quickly we could change the chords in the Global Track and the whole arrangement would be instantly changed to the appropriate harmony.

Many trance-goa maker would jump into Reason for a feature like this right away..
Except for the drums, how would the scale work if they were not bounced tracks?
Players works as long as there's a device, bounced tracks could load into a sampler and get shifted , but the sampler should allow the start at evry point along the sample and sound natural.
Grain or Proton are the only two samplers that allows that at the moment, but I never tried to load a complete audio bounce into grain. I loaded full songs into Grain, so on paper it could work, otherwise one should go totally modular, anyway there's some scaling involved that does not make the process really easy working with devices as opposed to plain audio.

[Timmy Crowne]

Many trance-goa maker would jump into Reason for a feature like this right away..
Except for the drums, how would the scale work if they were not bounced tracks?
Players works as long as there's a device, bounced tracks could load into a sampler and get shifted , but the sampler should allow the start at evry point along the sample and sound natural.
Grain or Proton are the only two samplers that allows that at the moment, but I never tried to load a complete audio bounce into grain. I loaded full songs into Grain, so on paper it could work, otherwise one should go totally modular, anyway there's some scaling involved that does not make the process really easy working with devices as opposed to plain audio.

I think this is the kind of thing that would attract many users to Reason as a DAW; maximizing the full use of Reason’s modularity. There could even be multiple Global Tracks (maybe Macro Tracks would be a better name in that case.)

Drums then could receive their own MIDI track, or one of the Macro Tracks if there are multiple drum devices being controlled simultaneously.

Transposing audio to the active harmony wouldn’t be hard as long as the audio is mono. Basically the pitch correction of the audio track could follow whatever incoming chords/scales are being played. Polyphonic audio isn’t straightforward tho.