This thread has completely gone off the rails.

My advice to the OP -- if your goal is not to play the piano and you just want immediate feedback of scales/notes then don't worry at all about using midi plugins to help you do this. There are a ton of successful musicians that make music but can't play the piano roll worth a darn.

If you're seriously considering learning to play the piano, get a teacher. The immediate feedback is all worth it and nothing beats human-to-human interaction to help you avoid early mistakes and bad habits that might become hard to break later.

Are you purposefully trolling the thread, or what?[/quote]

No I'm not. You are suggesting that learning all the scales in all the keys is a piece of cake. Even if we don't count all 462 scales, you are leaving out the blues, wholetone, octatonic, bebop etc scales, essentially the harmony of the twentieth century.

Whilst I agree the major scale is a good place to start, it is just that, a start.[/quote]

I don't believe in the bebop scale it's a fake scale. We've already covered bebop in much to much detail elsewhere.

Take a look at this guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCC-bPvGeM

The guy who cut up the dvd started it on dorian but he started it on Ionian I have the video cassete. It's a workout he goes through all the modes of the diatonic and then works thru all the modes based on the melodic and harmonic scale not to mention whole tone, half whole and diminished Then he starts working through some other finger busters. It's a workout.

When one practices scales intensely it liberates your mind and improves your timing. Sure it's tough at first. With practice it gets easier. But practice has to be a daily habit.

What would you suggest i use instead of a midi plugin? Do you think its best to just try trail and error to find what works or are you suggesting i just use image references of scales etc. As you say i was not intending on learning the piano my intention is to improve the melodies of my tracks in some small way by being able to play within scale i like the sound of.

462 scales? If you are going to use that many scales there is no point to learn any of them. Just pick a random set of notes and see what you can do with them.

Get a firm understanding of the major and minor tonalities and you can cover a lot of territory. Almost anything that your average Joe in the West would listen to from JS Bach to Lady Gaga. There are exceptions of course. If you want to go into different territory you have to understand that it's not just a matter of memorizing a new scale. Different territory means different idioms. Of course you can experiment and make up your own rules as you go, but in that case there is no need to memorize a scale.

Hi L-Stance,
The original idea of MIDI Effect Transpose -> MIDI Effect Scale -> VSTi is what I meant for your needs. If I recall the default presets the MIDI Effect in Live comes with covers a lot of ground. If you want to program your own just go to sites like http://www.8notes.com/resources/notefinders/piano_chords.asp and set your root note to C and then set the notes in the MIDI Effect Scale. Then you can transpose it up or down with the MIDI Transposer so that the root note of the scale will always be C on the physical MIDI keyboard.

There are also other interesting tools like ChordSpace http://www.chordspace.com/ChordSpaceindex.htm and tonespace http://www.mucoder.net/en/tonespace/ . Playing with all of the above will give you a much better idea of the kinds of sounds you like.

Good Luck!

Thanks for actually answering my question man, was almost about to give up on this thread. Yeh that looks like itll work Ive been messing around with what you said a bit already. Ill repost how it goes

Edit: Tonespace is really cool, thats exactly what ive been looking for thanks!!

Glad to help and good luck exploring. I look forward to hearing on your progress.

I agree, but that's not what people do when they "learn scales". If I might, I have some advice that doesn't involve a plug-in or "weeks of practice".

Don't bother memorizing scales if you don't want to. Simply look at the notes in your harmony. Let's say you have 3 chords in a 4 bar phrase: D, B, F#m, F#m. If you can read your piano roll, then you can see which notes are being played in each bar. [D - F# - A] [B - D# - F#] [F# - A - C#] [F# - A - C#]. Knowing this, you have some options. You can always play those 3 tones in each bar that make up the chord and it will sound fine, if a little stale. You could mash all 6 notes together into a synthetic scale, which would sound weird, but unique (I just tried it - not bad). But you can also play almost any other note on your keyboard.

There are a few things to keep in mind. Generally, don't flat the fifth (the "last" note in each chord). Also, avoid flatting the third (the "middle" note), though it could sound cool. But play anything else. Experiment. Make the sound your own.

A basic understanding of the language used to describe music will increase your love of it many fold. With all the resources on the Internet, it's criminal to not know the fundamentals. It may involve a modicum of practice and learning, but this is not beyond you.


Chords
http://player.vimeo.com/video/11666854

Lots of stuff
http://www.musictheory.net/lessons

this went off the rails in several directions.

look, if you want to get a handle on 'better melody' what you must do is gain experience with melodies; melodies that were made by people that had a grip on melodies.

scales are not going to, per se [through itself] get you experience with melody. you can practice scales 24/7 and get sharp at practicing scales and achieve nothing more.

it's valuable to know what a scale is, in that a scale is a set which contains intervals. a scale in a musical passage might be a connective tissue to get you from point to point - for a reason - but melody has to do with rhythm and contour. the great melodies are singing melodies, which means the person wrote them HEARING them; singing them, singing them in their mind, playing them, finding through improvisation a moment that worked, and now another moment, in spacetime, in the world, for real.

find out what intervals produce what effects in songs, how that distance between notes made you feel.

you are not going to wake up one day hearing melody after only ever using a plugin to tell you the rudimentary information; nor are you going to wake up one day hearing melody if all you have been arsed to do is run scales like an automaton. The people that know from melody have absorbed what melody is by playing/singing melodies that are there as models, gained experience, and thought/been reflective.

You are not necessarily entitled to this out of a belief about yourself ['Being a producer, I can HAZ!'] or out of buying a machine and some software. It is something you devote yourself to thoroughly to, apply yourself directly to, and be honest about the work it will take. If what you want is to pretend, well, do what the other children do and stick somebody else's audio onto a sequencer and play make believe. Otherwise expect to do work and expect it to take time and be frustrating. And expect to fail frequently, perhaps utterly in the end. This isn't for wimps.

I never suggested that.
Then again, just yesterday I took a weird African pentatonic scale (I IIb IIIb V VIb) for fun, and started jamming with it after what, 30 seconds spent with getting familiar? Why? Because it's bloody Phrygian without the fourth and seventh! And Phrygian is just the major scale "shifted up" two degrees!
There aren't that many variations that you have to learn from heart. You have to see connections.

I agree entirely with you on that. I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that it would be more useful to a novice musician to know what to play before they start playing. i.e have the connections explained before acquiring the muscle memory.

exactly!

cheers for the input people, jus was wondering if there was a plugin that might give me a hand learning a bit more about intervals and scales etc.

Im not hoping to suddenly find some holy grail of melody, just figured since we do live in a digital age that there might be sum cool new ways of learning and low and behold there is: Tonespace 2. Im just trying to make music i like, sum of you really shouldn't be so seriouse, you gotta remember to enjoy the process you know? Tonespace 2 seems a great little app so give it a look if your lookin for something similar.

I think we can all stop talking about the virtues of music creation now before my inbox explodes;)

Thanks
Last edited by L-Stance on Fri May 04, 2012 4:11 am; edited 1 time in total

Being someone that's studying music for many years now, I still fall stumble across some posts ehere, specially when I see statements like "major scale" et al. It seems there a lot of confusing terms and concepts around here.
There isn't something like a "major scale" or "minor scale". There are major MODES and minor MODES, as there are pentatonic modes, and several other modes.
A scale is a sequence of notes starting somewhere. That's why we say: play the scale of C in major mode, or play the scale of C in minor mode (meaning play a major mode sequently, starting from C, or play a minor mode sequently, starting from C). We can play a melody in C minor, and we will not have a scale, but a melody, or a composition in C minor (the minor mode of C), see?

Understanding this is very important, IMO, because modes are exactly that: ways of being, sequences of interrelated intervals that constitue an entity by themselves, and create a "mood" (mode).

That's why I am horrified when I see people mixing major, minor, dorian, phrygian, etc. sometimes calling them scales, sometimes, modes, calling scales to ones, modes to others and vice versa, as if everything was a kind of soup ingredients. Some of these concepts may be helpful for someone that wants to improvise over a certain chord progression, but I don't think they are helpful at all for someone that wants to achive composing, and/or analysing. More important even, they are wrong, at least from what I learned (starting with the greek names used, which are wrong and meaningless, although they have been used wrongly for centuries now).

Back on topic. As Jancivil pointed very well, to achieve a melody, all you need is to sing it. If you can sing it, and it remains in your head, you may have something meaningful. What "scales" you use, what modes is it in, that's secondary. You may gfind helpful to have a meaningful text, because words sometimes call a mood, but having melodic references is very important. So, if you want to create melodies, try to question yourself what is a melody for you (believe it or not, what is a melody for some may not be a melody for others, and you may hear a melody where others just listen to a beat, or some chords).

Haha sorry for the sloppy language, but I don't see how it would subtract from the understandability of what we are talking about.
When someone says a song uses "the C and G major scales", it is obvious that he means "the ionian mode in C and in G".
It's like even mechanical engineers talk about the "weight" of a part, even though the proper word would be "mass". And I've heard seasoned jazzmen say "scale" when they meant "mode" so I guess it'll be good enough for me.