Scaler Music announces Scaler 3
by The Press Desk   16th January 2025

Can’t wait to give this a go today!

Guaranteed NAMM TEC Award Winner! Heck, I think it even deserves a Technical Emmy..this thing is an absolute masterpiece.

I am an artist... can I use my own custom scales or am I bound to other artists scales?

Absolutely, that`s what it is made for in the first place.
I use to have my chords & progressions ready, then (midi)record them in Scaler
and play around with the suggestions, alternatives etc. to see what comes up.

My question:
before I install, can it co-exist with Scaler 2?

Hate to ask, but why? Intro Sale = £79 / €79 / $79

Even with taxes added on the $ this doesn't make sense to me.

For anyone who’s not a Plugin Boutique fan, you can buy it directly from the dev now.

https://scalermusic.com

It's crazy to me how overly complex and convoluted this thing is.

This thing needs so many different tabs and views in order to create a chord progression and melody, meanwhile Captain Plugins puts all the composition features you need in one central piano roll view that is consistent across Captain Chords, Captain Melody, Captain Bass, etc.

This multi-timeline view is so unnecessary. It's basically replicating the concept of MIDI tracks in your DAW into Scaler, with the downside that my DAW's features around working with MIDI tracks are of course way better than Scaler's, plus I'm already familiar with my DAW's workflow, while I would need to learn Scaler's. Seriously, why would you wanna create a poor man's DAW inside the Scaler plugin? That just makes my workflow worse, not better. It's also just more steps to get my multi-track composition out of Scaler into my DAW later. Absolutely unnecessary. Once again, in Captain Plugins, you simply create a few different tracks in your DAW for your bass, chords, melodies, etc. and instantiate the appropriate Captain plugin on each of the tracks and they are all synchronized with each other. For instance, you create a chord progression in Captain Chords on track 1, then Captain Bass on track 2 automatically (or manually, which ever you prefer) creates a suitable bass line, Captain Melody on track 3 helps you create a fitting melody, etc. That workflow keeps the core arrangement right in the DAW and makes way more sense than Scaler 3's multi-timeline thing.

Also why on earth would Scaler need to host instrument and effects VSTs?! Literally its only job is to produce MIDI that can be consumed by instruments downstream, so the best thing is to simply instantiate it as a MIDI effect before the MIDI instrument you want it to trigger. There is absolutely no need for Scaler to host the MIDI instrument. Why?! Once again, I just use Captain plugins as MIDI effects on a few different tracks and they each just trigger whatever instrument VST I insert on those tracks. That workflow makes sense, problem solved.

It's mind-boggling to me how unnecessarily complicated you can design a composition tool. They have added so many different views and introduce so many different concepts ("motions"? why?!). Exploring chords and all these things should just be centered around a central piano roll view like in Captain plugins.

I was hoping that they would take Scaler 3 as an opportunity to unify and simplify the bad workflow from Scaler 2, but they basically just added a ton of stuff to make the UX even more complex.

My recommendation: Before you buy this convoluted, complex mess, shoot it out against Captain Plugins and see which workflow you like better.

Some of us like convoluted. 😁 If it is too complex don’t buy it mate. This thing is a beast of a plugin, learning tool, chord generator, standalone DAW etc etc It will sell big time IMO. My upgrade is £29, a no brainer.

Ok, I just bought the upgrade and it's impossible to download Scaler 3 because of "Too many requests"...
It's strange, there are never "Too many requests" when it's time to take money 🤬

Except Captain crashes cubase pretty often in my case

Purchased as it was so low the price of the update but on the first run as vst3 it crashes the DAW. I will try later to see if a reboot could help.

Oh I see, that sucks of course. I use it in Logic, works fine there. The UI takes long to load sometimes.

you can ask chatgpt for chord progression help/alternatives … easy and cheap if you wanna go the AI route.
for those complaining about the complexity.

Scaler 3 is not centered around commercial music. Many motions have been played in by Jazz pianists without any quantization applied. The features have been added upon user requests. Many new features will be coming with future updates. If you are intimidated by all the possibilities, don´t use them. It´s that simple.

Stunned by the amount of votes after 5 hours! 52.000?

I am slow, I will need 5 days just to explore it, let alone giving a rate.

Interested in this plug, will follow the feedbacks here.

I've watched all the pre-reveal videos and imho it does look more accessible and appealing than v2 so I'm looking forward to it.

However they should probably stop sending you newsletter emails about the Scaler v3 release every 10 minutes while the download doesn't work.

I was having a look at this earlier. I thought that I could record performances as MIDI, but I couldn’t figure out how.
I love that it transcribes the chords for guitar. That alone is super useful for me.

I saw a video that demonstrated that there was a click, but I couldn’t find that either.

The presence of a click makes me think that I can record performances like in a regular sequencer, or am I wrong?

I’ll need to dive deeper. I mostly write music by ear, and I was thinking that using this alongside Cubase chord tracks to speed up my workflow for arranging strings etc.
Seems like a solid tool for expanding music theory knowledge.

You're not understanding my post above correctly. I'm not criticizing that there are so many possibilities. More power is better than less power. I'm criticizing that the workflow that exposes these possibilities is bad and unnecessarily complex. It's the UX that is bad. Captain Plugins provides 80% of the possibilities of Scaler 3 at 20% of the UI/workflow complexity (these are random numbers, but you get the point).

Scaler isn't very hard to learn. I think I got it up & going in about the time it takes to write a 5 paragraph diatribe.

Been using it for years. Not interesting in a new Captain - we got a good one already. Looking forward to the new features.

Cool! What DAW are you using?

cubase - I use to use the chordpads as a composition tool but Scaler blew it out of the water some years ago & I've a heavy user.

i like that i can record my chords into it & find keys that work for those chords, & kind of build the composition from there. like I know I want it to be phrygrian & not major or minor. etc. its super easy once you get use to the interface. I almost never have to look up anything.

Damn I am too nostalgic about Cubase, would love to have the time to switch back sooner or later...

Yes, I also don't want to tan in front of a monitor by clicking and picking chords.

I am sure it is easy to operate, but still having 52.000 people in 5 hours meaningfully giving a 5 star to a software that is not a 1 knob is laughable I think.

I remember having a tour of this kind of composer assistant years ago and Scaler was the right balance between easy of use and features. There was a standalone app I don't remember the name that could extract melodic pattern and apply to your progression and that was were I decided to play whatever I want, dub, and edit if needed, much faster to me. It was a very clever tool, but sucked the fun out of music for me.

I don't remember Capitan whatever cited in this post, maybe will have it a spin along this whenever I will have time.

but elvis said 52,000 bots can't be wrong.

i will say there is a massive marketing effort for the new version

52,000 for a global release of an award-winnng product, that's super cheap for what it provides, and will be used just as much in educational institutions as studios..thats been marketed and pre-sale for months...not so far fetched

Good god guys, don`t give yourself such a hard time,
you won`t believe how dead easy Scaler is and how fast it produces results.

Another plus are very good instructors,
give them some minutes as they go straight media in res, no boring noodling around:

If you know what you are doing, the workflow of Scaler is a breeze. Having said that, it is a matter of perspective. So many people have been waiting for this release and the pre-release marketing has been super eye-opening. Scaler 3 will win more awards. Just teaching yourself music theory with this plugin is so very welcomed. It has become a DAW within a DAW. This will help focus one’s attention although it may well be a bit too much for others who want to just press play. For me, I will be using it to expand on my chord knowledge and hopefully throw away vanilla chord progressions.

1 hour for scan VST, VST3,AU

I'm well into 1,000 plugs. Definitely took maybe 20mins for me