I am going to stop adding soon though and then they will have to wait until v1.1. There's still all the presets to do, manual to update (again), videos to make......Well, for all intents and purposes the sequences are tuneless, it really just represents a 2 octave range of notes, the root note being the centre. The sequence could be transposed either by the local transpose or the global transpose so the root could actually be any note.
So in an attempt to make it easy to work with C was chosen as the scale to be displayed as you need only a basic understanding of scales to know what C major is for instance. So Vortex for the sake of simplicity pretends that all sequences are in C.
Now say you have an arpeggio cycling through a C Minor chord, if you then turned on Squash to Scale and made a C major chord the sequence would then be squashed to C Major using the rule set in the master section. So if it is UP then wrong notes are transposed upwards to the next valid note in the squash scale. So the D# notes in this example would be transposed up to E.
Like the Sequence Display the squash scale is unrelated to actual pitch, it is only dealing with the relationship between notes, the first note being the root. This tallies with the middle note on the sequence display, we are simply working with the relationship to the root.
I hope that makes sense!
So why does the squash to scale exist? Here's an example of an easy way to generate a preset (I plan to do a video with this):
1: Start with an initialized preset
2: Switch on Squash to Scale, make a C Minor Chord on the Scale display.
3: Click set to All
Now all Sequences are set up to Squash to C Minor, so you can go to a sequence and randomize or draw away knowing that all of the sequences will work together regardless of what you do.
Vortex is based on the classic style of step sequencer like what you would get on the MS2000 for instance, those kind of sequencers are dealing with a relationship of notes, not hard coded notes like on the cubase note editor for instance.
As for changing the display based on the root note, it would make things very confusing, it's a 2 octave relationship with the root note in the middle. If you remember I was reluctant to have white/black notes on there in the first place because it then becomes locked to C visually which is misleading. The display represents a 2 octave range of notes with a root in the middle, octave above at the top and octave below at the bottom. The root note has to be in these positions as that is what the step sequencer is
So when we added the C markings to the display, the problem is that now we have to pretend that the scale is always in C, once you accept the fact that it isn't but the display makes it easier to see what's going on, it's all good (I think).Phew, hope I covered it well enough, I'm just about to get today's beta out and then bed...
