Post
by yur2die4 » Tue Mar 28, 2017 12:12 am
A piano has 12 'notes' repeating over and over again. Imagine those as like a rainbow that repeats. Those 12 notes are like having roygbiv and every little gradient in between. So when you press a key and go 12 keys up (including both white and black) and end up at the next instance, that is like going through the whole rainbow.
Now, unless you are Lisa Frank, you probably don't want all your paintings to look like rainbows.
Most popular music just takes a few colors that work well together from the entire rainbow and only uses those notes to create a musical piece. I guess you could say you're filtering out some of the in-between colors in order to have strong intervals from one color to the next so that the ones you've chosen are more meaningful in the composition.
Scale is like that filter. It will take out all the notes that don't fit into a particular scale and force only the ones within the scale to be used. I highly recommend taking the time to get into music theory, but if you'd rather experiment with making music right away and want to go for an approximation of classic regular music, then you could use the Scale effect. The scale effect itself has some presets, and there are places where you can download more presets. It also has a transposer so if you are using the C Minor, you can turn the knob to switch from a root of C to perhaps D and now your be in D minor.
Generally a person wouldn't use notes outside a particular scale. Actually, that's mostly wrong, but it'll have to be accepted in this case because it is ideal to place the scale effect Just before your instrument.
As for the Chord effect, it takes specific intervals out of the scale..for the most part.. And allows you to play that group of notes, which will have certain kinds of tension or resolution. Where the scale is like selecting a palette from a pure rainbow, the chord can almost be considered as a specific group of colors for painting the sky or the trees or a barn. The chord device might have some basic triads. If you use one of those presets before Scale then scale will retrofit the intervals to accommodate within the chosen scale. Due to the nature of scales, these major or minor presets would end up switching between major, minor, and possibly diminished types of scales as you play around.
You 'can' use Chord after scale. This will have a very very different kind of effect and might sound neat, especially for like power chords and stuff. What would happen in that case is your scale device would choose the 'root' keys and then the chord device would play the designated intervals statically (as in, the chord 'type' would never change). You can get really creative if you use racks.. but that's another story.
If you have something nice going with a few channels of these devices (you probably want ALL channels to use the same Scale setting, but you could determine what chord setting you want per channel, or in many cases not even use Chord since it might make a part really busy), another fun device to use between those two (or before or after either of them) is Arpeggiator.
Hope that gives you an idea. You can use these either while drawing notes into clips or by triggering notes on a musical keyboard or qwerty keyboard.
